


Learning to Live Again

by saltysarah



Category: Ready or Not (2019)
Genre: All my headcanons, Angst, Attempted Suicide, Bisexual Daniel, Blatant Nerdery, F/M, Family Feels, Fix-It, Gen, Inappropriate Humour, POV Daniel, Post-Canon, Recovery, Sex, Temporary Character Death, The Le Domas family is its own warning, Therapy, Unreliable Narrator, gratuitous and excessive use of swearwords, headcanons, my ot3: daniel/grace/happiness, superfluous application of pop culture, will update tags as the story progresses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:48:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24289180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltysarah/pseuds/saltysarah
Summary: Sometimes, the afterlife is a studio apartment with your sister-in-law. Ex sister-in-law? He’d seen the strewn mail on the coffee table and knew she’d kept the family name. Could you even get divorced post-mortem? He’d totally understand if she wanted to ditch every last trace of them. He didn’t understand why she hadn’t ditched him.Inspired by Juurensha's amazing ghostly fix-it - The Haunting of Grace Le DomasInspired by Shaekspeares' amazing AU - said he'd love me for the rest of my days
Relationships: Alex Le Domas/Grace Le Domas (past), Daniel Le Domas & Grace Le Domas, Daniel Le Domas/Alcohol, Daniel Le Domas/OMC (past)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 92





	1. The Main Story

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Haunting of Grace Le Domas](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23621380) by [juurensha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/juurensha/pseuds/juurensha). 
  * Inspired by [said he’d love me for the rest of my days](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20551142) by [shaekspeares](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaekspeares/pseuds/shaekspeares). 



> This is so fucking indulgent? Like, I watched the damn movie and read every last scrap of Grace/Daniel fic I could get my greedy paws on and it still wasn’t enough? I loved them so damn much that I had to write my own version of how they learnt to live post-canon, getting better, getting worse, but at all times just being together.

Maybe it should’ve been weirder sitting next to the woman who was responsible for the deaths of his family, but Daniel was a ghost. His tolerance for weird had pretty much gone out the window the moment he’d caused his newly-married uncle to die. If there was one thing that was weird about this situation, he kinda thought that would be the fact that he was even here instead of his brother, considering, well, y’know.

“Not even Alex?” he asked, cringing. It kind of hurt to think that his brother was dead, that there really hadn’t been any hope for their family, not even the good one. He’d done all of this for Alex and Grace-.

His thoughts were interrupted by laughter. It wasn’t a pleasant sound; it sounded like a rusty chainsaw. Daniel remembered the way Grace had smiled on her wedding day, how beautiful and in-love she’d been – but not too in-love to shoot back a retort or 5. The Grace beside him now was pretty damn different from the Grace then.

No guesses why.

Grace shrugged the left sleeve of her oversized sleep shirt off, baring a livid scar near her armpit.

“He dragged me into that goddamned room and stabbed me as the rest of your family held me down on that fucking table.”

Daniel wanted to vomit.

“He wouldn’t,” he whispered. “Not to- he _loved_ you.”

Grace sneered, tugging the shirt back over her shoulder. “He loved himself more.”

That hurt. That hurt more than- that hurt a lot. The Alex he remembered had been committed to saving Grace. Daniel didn’t know how things could’ve changed so drastically.

“He’d lost you,” Grace offered, “and just saw me brutally murder your mum.”

“How?” he croaked.

“I mean, she shot at me with a crossbow and then tried to strangle me when that didn't take. And then went on to tell me I didn’t deserve a family."

Daniel snorted. “Poetic justice.” He supposed he should feel more about his own mother’s death, but all he could think about was her hand on his shoulder as she praised him for being an accessory to murder. Growing up, he’d had (actual) nannies more caring than her, a feeling he’d tried to impart to his siblings. Obviously, he’d failed miserably in that respect.

“He held out his hand to me, y’know, after your mum.” Grace was staring sightlessly over the city. “When I pulled away he said, ‘You won’t be with me after this, will you,’ and then he _held my head_ and-." 

“Jesus Christ.”

“Not sure he exists.”

“You can believe in the devil but not in Jesus?”

“Ah, but I’ve actually met the devil. Can’t say the same about the other guy.”

Daniel let his head thump back heavily against the wall. This ought to be weird. “Does any of this seem weird to you?”

“What, the part where my in-laws tried to ritually sacrifice me to the devil or where they blew up in the morning like bloody, bloody water balloons? How about the part where my brother-in-law died for me and is hanging around as a ghost?”

He couldn’t help fidgeting. “The, ah, the last one. And you don’t have to say it that way, that’s not-.”

“I thought about it after, you know?” Grace interrupted. “Charity wouldn’t have fired if I’d been in front. They needed to catch me, right, not kill me? No, that was for that fucking table. Then maybe you could’ve-.”

“Hey.” Daniel almost reached out to touch her before remembering. “Hey, don’t do that to yourself. It’s not worth thinking like that, and I think you’re underestimating Charity’s ability to be a petty, contrary bitch. And for what? Your drunk pervert of a brother-in-law?” He shook his head. “Not worth it.”

“My drunk _truthful_ pervert of a brother-in-law,” Grace said fiercely.

“What?”

“You were the only one who tried to tell me the truth,” she spat. “You and your stupid little hints and fucking cutting jibes – no one would’ve taken you seriously – but at least you fucking tried.”

_It’s more than I could say for Alex._

They didn’t speak the words, but it rang hollow in their minds anyway. Daniel could still feel Alex’s hands clutching at his neck, the desperate cries for him not to go, the tears that had dripped onto his face. He had known without a doubt that Alex had loved him; there was no point putting up a front before a dying man.

If their roles had been reversed, if he had been the one watching Alex bleed out on the fucking vintage Persian rug, he would’ve welcomed exploding the way Grace said the rest of his family had, might've even begged for it.

Daniel looked down at his shined oxfords. “Was it- do you think I could’ve done more?”

Grace just sighed. “It’s my turn to tell you not to do that to yourself.”

“If Alex had loved you, he would never have married you,” he abruptly declared.

“I pushed him,” Grace said. “I told him I’d leave him if he wouldn’t marry me.”

“Of course he didn't wanna marry you!” Daniel exploded. “He didn’t wanna fucking lose you!”

Grace stared at him with those big blue eyes of her, swimming with tears she refused to shed.

"He said he knew I would've left if I'd known," she said, her mouth twisting bitterly. Well, no shit, anyone with any sense at all would've fucked off at the first sign of the Le Domas family bullshit. A tear trailed down the side of her face and she hastily wiped it away. "So he proposed instead." 

That was the one thing about Alex Daniel hadn’t been able to reconcile. He’d sworn to him, again and again that he’d get out of their family, that he’d never come back. But then Alex had introduced Grace to him – as a stopgap, he could see that now, with the clarity of hindsight – and Daniel had been so fucking furious. If Alex had truly loved her the way he’d claimed, he would have let her go, because that’s what you did for people you loved.

It couldn’t have been that hard; even Daniel had managed that much.

But instead Alex had hemmed and hawed all the way back to their family estate – and then he’d sworn he’d get Grace out. That he’d be better than their family.

Daniel had believed it, hook, line, and sinker. He’d _died_ for it, believing that to be the truth.

“He lost me the moment he proposed and kept his damn mouth shut.”

Charity had been the one to proposition him and even when he told her about the family tradition, it hadn't changed her mind in the least. He’d admired that about her, once, her unrelenting drive and ambition.

He’d proposed because he couldn’t have cared less what Charity's answer would've been; at least she’d had the chance to make up her own damn mind.

Alex proposed because he never wanted Grace to leave, and never even gave her a chance to do otherwise.

“I thought he was better than that,” was all Daniel could manage, in the end.

“Me too.”

* * *

  
  


She told him the rest of the story in increments. After the rest of his family had exploded and the fire had consumed the mansion, the police and EMTs arrived to cordon off the area and cart her off to the hospital. Georgie’s gunshot took 7 surgeries to reconstruct around the hole in her hand and some days she cried after physical therapy from the amount of pain she was in.

The back wounds had barely little better. In fact, Alex’s stab wound was, ironically, the cleanest of the lot and the first to heal.

Neither of them counted the nightmares (night terrors hallucinations memories).

A week after she was admitted to the hospital, the police and FBI showed up to get her statement, the police because this was their under jurisdiction and the FBI because inheriting the entire Le Domas dominion made Grace the richest woman in America.

She’d fainted the moment she’d heard that and they’d been forced to come back the following day. Daniel had gotten a kick out of that and sorely missed the fragrance of scotch opening up on his tongue.

Grace told them as much as she dared – from her in-laws’ sick psychopathic game to her own attempts to escape: scalding the butler, pistol-whipping Charity, bludgeoning his mother to death, the poor maids who’d been nothing but collateral. She insisted she’d made his role on that Night crystal-clear.

“What, the part where I gave you 10 whole seconds and then hit you over the head on the grounds?” he drawled, rolling his eyes. "Mustn't forget the scotch I offered."

“How about the part where you poisoned your family and died protecting me?” Grace retorted, eyes ablaze.

It was those eyes, Daniel thought, those huge blue eyes of hers that revealed absolutely everything. He remembered seeing those eyes for the first time, warm with the smile she’d sent Alex’s way.

“You were the only one who even tried to give me a chance,” she declared. “I wasn’t going to let you be tarred and feathered along with the rest of them.”

He just shook his head and stared at his empty hands, practically strangers without a tumbler in them.

“You didn’t have any trouble in the aftermath?” he asked, changing the subject instead.

Grace cleared her throat. “I think it helped that I didn’t care,” she said. “And based on my list of injuries, they concluded that there was no way I could’ve taken out…however many there were in the house. The goat pen helped, too, I heard them saying something about ‘Silence of the Lambs’.”

Daniel snorted. “Glad my family’s psychosis could get you off the hook.”

“They recovered the maids’ bodies,” Grace continued. “Well, their remains after the fire had got to them, and the butler in the car. It helped corroborate my story. And-.” Here she faltered, looking at him uncertainly.

“What is it?” he asked, trying to remember to gentle his tone. It had been so long since he’d treated someone with kid gloves – maybe when they had all still been kids themselves and Emilie had just been a crybaby, not a drug-addicted fuck-up.

“I told you how your family exploded, right?” Daniel nodded encouragingly. “Not you, though.” He blinked. “They found your body, same as the maids.”

“I’m…glad not to have exploded post-mortem?”

Grace shook her head. “Daniel, they didn’t even find your mum’s body,” she said. “They used your blood and managed to get familial matches off the splatter on the walls, but there wasn’t a single other Le Domas corpse on the grounds.”

They stayed silent for a long time, Daniel trying to terms with what Grace was or wasn’t saying.

“Do…you think that’s why I’m here and they’re…not?”

Grace wrapped her arms around herself, tucking her heels up tight against her thighs. She looked so small and shattered on her soft, squishy sofa.

“I saw him, you know?”

“Who?”

“Le Bail, in the fire, after they all exploded and I was just…standing there staring. I saw him in that bloody chair. He looked straight at me and nodded.”

“Holy shit.”

“I don’t think there was anything holy about it.”

He could forgive her snide commentary, especially when it sounded so much like his own.

“The pact was real, then,” he said redundantly.

“I’d say.”

“But- no one contested the inheritance? I mean – I get why you might want to get as far away as you can from anything to do with my family, but I can’t think of anything fucking them over more than you surviving and thriving off of- of all that shit,” he finished lamely.

He did mean it, though. If his family’s estate was going to go to somebody, he was glad it was the one person who knew the weight of its whole horrible history.

Grace just sighed, uncurling slightly against the sofa arm. “I mean, I was the only remaining Le Domas – in name, at least, and the instructions about the inheritance were pretty clear. I don’t know if anyone tried to contest anything, I was pretty out of it those first few weeks, and by then I had a really good legal team firmly in my corner.” One corner of her mouth quirked up. “I suppose I have you to thank for that.”

Daniel snorted. “Not really, I was just the accountant.”

“Have you never seen the Ben Affleck film?” Grace retorted, scrabbling for her T.V. remote. “God.”

“Is it one of those fraud movies?” he asked suspiciously. “’Cause I know it’s hard to believe, but I actually came by my CPA honestly; I’m only drunk, like, 300 days out of the year.” Daniel thought over that last sentence and corrected, “I _was_ only drunk 300 days out of the year. Does it count as cold turkey if I don’t actually get alcohol cravings anymore?” He didn’t feel much of anything anymore but thought that was probably a little too much honesty.

Grace looked him over a little disbelievingly. A few months ago he would’ve smirked and leered back. A few months ago, he and his family were still alive.

“Dad was one of those old-school ‘why do it yourself if you can pay someone else to do it’-types. Besides, he married in. His family was well-to-do, but not _Le Domas-_ level.”

He could tell he’d taken Grace by surprise, causing her to look away from the Netflix homepage. “Really? I would never have been able to tell.” She shook her head. “I told Alex before the wedding that I didn’t care if his family was richer than god, and I meant it.”

“Only as rich as the devil,” he quipped. “And you not being able to tell was the whole point. Mum and Aunt Helene were sisters. They’d never worked a day in their lives, never needed to. Emilie was almost the same, but in her case it was more of a _couldn’t_ work rather than wouldn’t work.”

Daniel let his head tip back as he stared at Grace’s naked ceiling, wondering if he ought to feel guilt about dishing the dirt on his family in this manner.

“The only things Fitch managed to accomplish in life were surviving his wedding night and knocking Emilie up, twice, even. And Alex struck out on his own after university.”

“Process of elimination, huh?”

His head lolled to one side to be able to look at her. Grace was already looking back, the blue of her eyes almost electric in the dim glow of the T.V. screen.

“The Le Domas dominion certainly wasn’t going to run itself,” he pointed out. “At least not until I got us set up with a whole bunch of checks and balances and management structures.”

Grace’s smile was wry. “Leaving you more time to drink afterward?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely, you know me so well, sis.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t call me that.”

He glanced at her. “You are still legally my sister-in-law.” He’d seen the mail carelessly strewn on her coffee table, knew she’d kept the family name. He wasn’t sure if it was out of convenience, considering how she was the sole heir of the Le Domas dominion, or if it was even possible to get divorced if your spouse was already dead. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know if she’d tried.

“Maybe, but that’s weird, though,” she retorted. “When I think of your sister, I think of Emilie.”

Hardly the most flattering comparison.

“Well, if you put it that way…”

“Shut up and watch The Accountant with me,” she told him. “You can shit on your family more after.”

It was 3 in the morning and Grace showed no signs of going to bed anytime soon despite her pallor and the enormous bags under her eyes. Honestly, he would prefer it if she went the fuck to sleep, but she’d woken 5 times in the past week screaming and crying and fighting out of imaginary holds; thank god for soundproofing. The other 2 times she’d just laid in bed and stared unseeingly into the ceiling. He was certain she'd agree that wasn't exactly an improvement.

“Will you go to bed after?”

“I didn’t kill your mum just for you to take her place,” Grace snapped. Daniel didn’t know what his face looked like but it stopped her short. Her face spasmed, mouth puckering as if she’d bitten into something sour, and she asked, “Too much? Too soon?”

“Yeah,” he rasped. It was strange; he hadn’t minded Grace retelling how she’d brained her with that fucking game box.

“I’m sorry,” she said, hand hovering in the limbo between their bodies. He could tell that she meant it, that she hadn’t wanted to upset him.

Daniel shook his head. “I’m already dead; it doesn’t matter.”

“Daniel. Daniel, of course it matters.”

He couldn’t see how.

“Just- just play the movie, okay? I’ll be here.”

He didn’t know if he could go anywhere else.

* * *

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course.

Grace started going to therapy again and came back from her sessions even more haunted than before. She spent a week ignoring him and pretending he didn’t exist and for a moment there Daniel thought he’d lost his mind, too. He tried throwing himself off her balcony and, when he kept reappearing in her living room, hit a new low by trying to drown himself in her toilet bowl, not that it worked, either.

But Grace came back midway through his 3rd attempt and he didn’t know what she saw, but she freaked the fuck out and lost it.

“Have you been trying to kill yourself the entire time?” were the first words she’d said to him all week. Daniel might’ve wanted her to acknowledge him again, but he hadn’t wanted to guilt her into doing so in the first place.

“Not the entire time,” he said, which ought to have been enough, only Grace had somehow become fluent in Arsehole while he wasn’t looking and could hear exactly what he hadn't said.

“Jesus Christ, Daniel,” she wept, sinking to her knees just outside the bathroom. He stared down at the bowl and- who was he kidding, he pulled his head out, curls dry and intact, his wedding suit untouched.

“If you wanna leave, I’m not gonna stop you,” Grace sobbed, and he couldn’t understand why she was crying for him. She’d cried when Charity had shot him, too, he remembered the way those big blue eyes of hers and scrunched up and glittered with tears as she’d put her hands on his neck and tried to keep him from bleeding out. “But not like this, Daniel. Not like this.

“I can’t come home to find you- you can’t do this to me, Daniel.”

He never meant to make her beg.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, hushed, creeping forward to flutter his hands over her shoulders. “Grace, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking – I didn’t think.”

“Did you ever?”

He recoiled.

“If you want to leave, I will find you a goddamned exorcist or whatever the fuck you need to pass into the light or you can go to hell the way you’re chomping at the bit to,” Grace ground out to her clenched fists, pressed into her thighs. He noticed how her left hand couldn’t close completely, her ring finger and pinky almost completely straight despite how they both trembled with tension.

“But not like this, Danny,” she whispered. It was the first time she’d ever called him by anything other than his full name. “Not like this.”

His own hands ached in their futility.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, lamely. “I thought- you didn’t even look at me. I thought you couldn’t see me anymore and if that was the case, what was the point?”

Grace gradually pulled herself together, snivelling and scrubbing at her blotchy face. “I tried seeing a new therapist.” She paused, sniffing pathetically. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and smeared snot across her cheek.

“I won’t see him again.”

“Okay,” he said, “okay.” Daniel looked down at his oxfords, still fucking sparkling. He was even pretty sure his stubble was exactly the same as it had been that Night. “I’ll- I’ll leave you to it. I’ll just be waiting in the living room.”

He edged past her and fled.

Could ghosts hyperventilate? Sinking into the soft plushness of her sofa, he was certainly going to give it his best try.

* * *

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, staring up at the bare ceiling like it was an uncanny reflection of his own mind.

A wash of warm air hit the back of his neck and he started, abruptly brought back to the present. Daniel looked overhead to see Grace emerge from the bathroom, hair damp and cheeks blood-warm.

She’d changed, too, into a lumpy jumper and overlong flannel pants.

“Is it time for a bedtime story?”

Grace stared at him flatly. “You can’t even help yourself, can you?”

“I was an arsehole for 40- well, 39 years and 7 months, if we’re being exact,” he replied. “What can I say? It’s in my nature.”

Grace inhaled sharply and sank onto the sofa beside him, shifting her stare towards the wall-mounted T.V. “Do you want to leave?”

“I thought that was what you wanted.”

She slowly shook her head. “I’m asking what you want, Daniel.”

He thought he liked it better when she called him ‘Danny’. “What I want doesn’t matter, Grace, I’m already dead. Wants and desires are for the living.” He hesitated before adding. “I’ve been intruding on you for too long already.”

“Have I ever said that?” she snapped.

“Look, you can’t want your dead brother-in-law hanging around forever, cramping your style,” he pointed out.

“My dead, drunk, truthful pervert of a brother-in-law,” Grace corrected. Daniel rolled his eyes.

“I’ll put that on my next name card. Look, I don’t even know how or why I ended up here in the first place.”

She turned that headlight stare back at him. God, those eyes, those enormous, lamp-bright eyes. He felt like he could burn under their intensity.

“Don’t you?”

He looked away, inexplicably ashamed.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he said- well, _whined_ might have been a more accurate term.

“Just tell me the truth,” she said.

Daniel swallowed harshly, feeling the tightness in his throat. “It’s on my name card, remember?”

One side of her mouth quirked upwards.

“Do you want to stay?”

“Gracie-.”

“ _Danny.”_ That wasn’t fair. “Do you want to stay?”

…

……

“…yes.”

  
  


More time passed. Grace changed therapists, or more accurately, she went back to the first one she’d been seeing straight out of the hospital. Apparently the new therapist was supposed to have suited her better, given how her trauma was supposed to have subsided. Daniel didn’t ask what it was that the therapist had said and Grace didn’t volunteer the words, either.

She invited him out with her sometimes, wore a bluetooth earpiece in her ear so she could continue talking to him without people looking at her like she was insane. He wasn’t sure he would have thought of that so readily and marvelled again at how adaptable Grace was. When he wondered aloud if attending her therapy session wasn’t too personal, she merely clicked her tongue and said, “I wouldn’t have invited you if I hadn’t wanted to.”

He hadn’t understood why she wanted him there – at least until her session started.

“Are you still seeing ghosts, Grace?”

“All the time,” she answered truthfully. “But they’re not- they’re not all horrible anymore.”

Her therapist, a tiny wizened woman with a placard of ‘Dr. Huong Tran’, only smiled and nodded encouragingly. “That’s good to hear.”

She was going to make him blush.

“I understand that I did terrible things to survive,” Grace said stiltedly. “I don’t- regret doing those things because I would’ve died otherwise.”

“It wasn't a competition,” Daniel had to interrupt, even if only one side of the conversation could hear what he had to say. “You can’t- _weigh_ your life against theirs like that.” Her eyes flickered to where he was perched on the corner of Dr. Tran’s desk before focusing on the good doctor again.

“I just wanted to survive,” Grace confessed. “I didn’t want to do those things, but I didn’t want to die, either.”

“Those were your actions and your choices,” Dr. Tran said. “Similarly, you weren’t responsible for the actions and choices of the Le Domas family. Your actions were taken in defence of your person, Grace. I hardly think you’re going to bludgeon someone for no reason the moment you step out of this office.”

Grace smiled shyly. “Maybe not the _moment_ I step out.”

Dr. Tran smiled back even as Daniel frowned. Were they allowed to make murder jokes in therapy? For that matter, he thought all therapists had their sense of humour surgically removed in exchange for their their doctor titles.

They took a pitstop at the Starfucks around the corner.

“Starfucks,” Grace sniggered as she joined the queue.

“You’re a multibillionaire and you wanna get _shitty_ overpriced coffee?”

Grace rolled her eyes at him and sent him a fond smile, one hand on her earpiece. “Okay, tell me where I should go, then.”

He gave her the address of a discreet bar 2 blocks away which she followed until she realised where she was going.

“I’m not getting alcohol at noon, Daniel.”

“No one said you had to,” he whined. “They serve other drinks, too.”

“Are all your recommendations bars?”

“Some of them are clubs?”

Grace muttered something under her breath. “I’m going back to Starfucks.”

“Wait, what?”

“Sometimes a girl just wants shitty overpriced sugary drinks,” she said, turning on her heel and marching back the way she came, settling at one of the outside tables with what they claimed to be an iced caramel macchiato.

“Jesus Christ, that’s just sugar and milk.”

“ _Caramel_ and milk, I’ll have you know,” she said with an indolent slurp.

“Does that- do anything for you? Y’know, apart from give you diabetes.”

Grace pierced him with a mild look. “I hope you appreciate the irony of you lecturing me about drinks when you were well on your way to drinking yourself to liver failure.”

Daniel winced. “I just don’t want you to…”

Her look softened into something like pity. “We all have to die sometimes, Daniel.”

Diabetes would arguably be a better fate than a sacrifice in a satanic ritual. He wasn’t stupid enough to say something like, he hadn’t saved her for something like this because he certainly hadn’t saved her; she’d done a top-notch job all by herself.

After a long beat Grace relented, nudging her excuse of a sugar rush towards him. “You can give it a try if you like. It’s not that bad.” She laughed at the face he made.

He leant forward, enough to feel the chill emanating from the thin plastic cup and smell the overwhelming chemical sweetness only to rear back, cringing. Grace laughed again, pulling the drink away from him to take an obnoxious slurp. It was a miracle that she was still able to laugh like that. What he wouldn’t give to see that everyday for the rest of his afterlife.

* * *

Things came to a head after the new year, in April. Spring was in full bloom and the parks were beautiful, tree boughs heavy with ripe blossoms. Daniel had noticed April in the past, seeing as how Charity’s birthday was in May and she’d spend the entire month leading up to it planning the _perfect_ party, but he’d never noticed spring.

Grace did, of course, and she smiled more with every flower that fell into her hair even as she sneezed them all out in the next moment. Grace, apparently, had a frankly awful case of hay fever. Her sleep habits were more regular now, too, despite the prodigious use of Nyquil, but life was progressing for her. Every day after that Night she woke a little further out from the shadow cast by the Le Domas family and their sick games, and he was a little proud and privileged to witness it firsthand.

“I told you someone had to burn it all down,” he told her one evening while they were taking a shortcut through the park. “I knew it would be you.”

“Quite literally, since I dropped the lantern that started the fire,” Grace replied without missing a beat. “What brought this on, Danny?”

“I think that if anyone one else had survived, they’d be running scared,” he said, hands in his pockets as he took in the flurry of flowers around him, bowtie undone and jacket tucked in the crook of his elbow. “They'd always be waiting for the other shoe to drop. But not you. You – got over it sounds so trite, but-.”

Grace chortled, ducking her head. “It does, doesn’t it?” She looked up again, her blue eyes wide and clear. “And I’m not over it – you know that better than anyone, including Dr. Tran.”

The night terrors had decreased to an average of 2 a week, and Daniel was always on standby to shout her out of them. It was…heartening, to see the wild look in her eye calm at the sight of him.

“But you’re not letting any of that stop you,” he said.

“If the devil himself couldn’t,” she quipped, “I don’t see why the memories should.”

They laughed, surrounded by falling petals and leaves and the deep green scent of growing things, and they only laughed harder when Grace began to sneeze.

“C’mon, that’s a sign of the times,” he said, gesturing for Grace to step ahead of him. “I think you’ve inhaled enough pollen for today.”

“Party-pooper,” she muttered, her mouth twitching.

“It’s my party and I’ll poop if I want to,” he sang, causing Grace to choke.

“That’s not how the song goes!” she cried, dissolving into laughter again.

He grinned, so unbearably proud. He’d meant it, when he said none of them would’ve been able to enjoy a second lease of life, even if they could've earned it. They’d been running scared, all of them – scared that the pact was true, scared that it wasn’t true, scared of the past and scared of the future. Scared of being alone. Even his poor dead Alex – as much as Daniel had loved him, as far as he had tried to run – he’d run right back in the end.

He hadn’t realised he’d spoken aloud until Grace went still beside him.

“is that really what you think?” she asked.

“You do remember they all tried to kill you,” he said, eying her dubiously.

Grace huffed at him. “I remember that vividly, thanks, seeing as how they kept trying even after- even after you,” she finished lamely.

“That’s not what I meant,” he sighed, running a hand through his hair and making an irritated noise when he found petals caught in the curls. Grace giggled at the sight of him. “Y’know what really turned me?” he asked. “When I had that moment of – I mean, I always knew it wasn’t right, but I’d played along out of duty-.”

“But you reached a point where duty couldn’t explain it anymore,” Grace finished for him, her eyes as blue as the day was long.

“Dr. Tran really should start charging you extra,” he muttered. “Does she realise she’s therapy-ing you to therapy me?”

She snorted. “I’m pretty sure that’s not how the word works.”

“But that’s how the _world_ works,” he returned with a grin. “Language is an evolutionary process, English the most convoluted discombobulated babble of all.”

“This coming from a CPA?” Grace asked, eyebrow raised.

“I- had a boyfriend,” he confessed in a rush.

“A what?” Grace squawked.

Daniel raised his eyes heavenward, asking for patience. “A boyfriend. Y’know, like a girlfriend, only with a boy instead?”

“I know what a boyfriend is!” she squeaked. “I just didn’t think-.”

“No, of course not,” he scoffed. “Why would you? It’s not like I ever came out to anyone in the family.”

“Even Alex?”

“Of course not,” he repeated. “I wouldn’t have- I didn’t realise how deep I was getting until- well.” Some things were still private, even between them. “This was years before Charity, mind, when I was still in school.”

“Getting that CPA of yours?”

He smiled at her, wry. “Getting that CPA of mine.” He paused, considering. He could give her this much. “He was studying for his MFA, in the Philosophy of Languages.”

“I don’t even understand what that means,” Grace confessed with a frown.

He had to laugh. “Trust me, I didn’t either.”

She glanced up at him. “Sounds like some of it stuck anyway.” She looked back at the ground, scuffing her ridiculous converse sneaker into a pile of dried leaves. “What was his name?”

“Jory Mehigan.”

“Could I ask what happened?”

Daniel shrugged. “I told you, I was getting in too deep. So I broke his heart and left him.”

“ _Danny.”_

He shook his head. “That wasn’t what I wanted to tell you.”

Grace drew in a deep shuddering breath and pressed on; _attagirl._

“Alright,” she said. “What was it, then? What took you past the point of no return?" 

He snorted. “The final threshold? Really?”

“Could it be worse than the final countdown?”

Daniel groaned, covering his face with his hand as she giggled at him. “Now I have that stupid song stuck in my head.”

“Tell me,” she said. “What made you pass the point of no return?”

He rolled his eyes at her before sighing, looking straight ahead of him. “Emilie and I dumped the maids’ bodies into the goat pit,” he said, ignoring the way Grace bared her teeth at the memory. “While we were there she found Georgie knocked out in one of the stables.”

“If you’re asking for a confession-.”

“-a bit late now, don’t you think-.”

“-it’s not like I’d deny it,” she hissed, her left hand clenching and unclenching as much as it could. She’d regained a fair amount of mobility in the past few weeks especially, but it seemed like her pinky finger would always be a bit stuck. “The little shit shot me.”

“I wasn’t blaming you,” Daniel said, continuing forward in silence.

He could feel Grace watching him out of the corner of her eye but kept placidly on. He only started talking again when she drew level with him.

“I liked you from the moment I met you,” he said. “I could tell you were funny and kind and loyal.” He glanced over to find her watching him avidly. “You know what I said about you joining the family-.”

“It was a compliment,” Grace nodded, finally softening.

“Yeah, yeah,” he murmured, ducking his head to hide the heat in his ears. “An- anyway. But I wasn’t lying out there in the woods, either. I liked you, but not enough to see my family die for you. Not my siblings, not my nephews, maybe my parents on a bad day, definitely Aunt Helene.” He paused. “That, and my dad was hiding behind one of the trees the whole time.”

“Jesus Christ,” Grace swore, running her hands through her hair, fingers fluttering in agitation.

“But back to Georgie-.”

“Good god, are you sure you were a CPA? How did you manage numbers when you can’t even tell your story straight?”

“Gracie, darling, I thought you understood that the moral of the story is that I’m _not_ straight.”

She blinked those big blue eyes at him and then just guffawed, loud, honking noises full of mirth. He grinned to himself, enjoying the sight of her so clearly, viscerally alive.

“So Georgie’s lying in the hay with that big black shiner and he said that he’d shot you and when I asked what the fuck why, he said that it was what everyone else was trying to do.”

Grace sobered beside him.

“And Emilie just hugged him and told him how proud of him she was and I-.”

He inhaled sharply. “Do you know about the last round of Hide & Seek?”

Grace nodded slowly. “I overheard Helene talking about it with your dad. Char- Charlie, I think it was? Her husband, was it?”

He nodded tightly, still looking straight ahead. He didn’t know if he could face her after this or if she’d even want him to. “Uncle Charles,” he said. “Or as much an uncle as he could’ve been for one night. Maybe he would’ve escaped, I don’t know. But I hid Alex in the closet and when I saw him, I screamed my head off for everyone to come.”

Daniel glanced over at Grace to see how pale her face had gone. “You should sit,” he said.

“No,” she croaked. “Keep going.”

He shrugged. “There isn’t anything left to say. Maybe if Uncle Charles had hit me the way you had Georgie, he might have been able to keep me quiet. He might’ve escaped then, and our family would’ve been dead that much quicker.”

“That’s not the point,” Grace snapped. _“Keep going.”_

He swallowed. “I watched them shoot Uncle Charles with that fucking crossbow. Mum came up to me and told me how proud she was and when I looked at Emilie and Georgie, I could only see the same, twisted, _fucked up_ ways being passed down, generation after generation and the way they _looked_ at me because they didn’t understand why I was even _asking_ when I could still see Uncle Charles’ face _begging_ me to help and I-.”

“Danny.”

He looked up.

“Danny,” she said softly, her eyes soft and kind. “I think you should sit down.”

He collapsed onto the nearest park bench, pressed his face into his hands and wept.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, only barely aware of the wood creaking beside him when Grace also sat, close enough that he could feel the heat of her.

“I’ll tell you this as many times as it takes to stick, Danny,” she crooned. “You’re a good man. You’re a good, good man.”

“My own father called me a son of a bitch,” he drawled, shoving upright, Grace a moment behind.

“He’s the bitch, you’re just the son,” she said. “The other titles up for adoption are lover, child, mother, sinner, and saint, and 2 of them aren’t applicable to you.”

Daniel opened his mouth only to be stopped by Grace’s raised palm. “I told you, you’re a good man, Danny.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m hardly a saint.”

“That wasn’t what I called you,” she retorted.

He sighed. “Can we just agree to disagree on this? I don’t- I don’t like arguing with you. Not about this.”

“That’s because you know I’m right and you’re wrong.”

“Oh my god, Grace, that is not how an argument goes.”

“That only goes to show how few arguments you’ve won.”

“Oh my god,” he said again, covering his mouth to try and hide his amusement. She waited until he looked back at her, held his gaze, and then _winked._

He couldn’t understand how Alex chose to give this up – gave _her_ up, this brightness and joy. Surely, _surely,_ even if he hadn't been able to keep her (and that word alone already raised so many flags in his mind), it should’ve been enough for her to keep on breathing, to keep on living, even if it wasn’t by his side.

He’d looked Jory in the eye when he’d broken his heart and told him a version of the truth: that his family would never accept them, that he couldn’t choose Jory over them.

“Grace, you said – Alex hadn’t proposed until you-.”

“Until I threatened to leave him,” she replied, smiling wanly. “He hated talking about his family and only ever talked about you. I thought I was good enough to fuck but not good enough for the family name.” She let out a hollow laugh. “God, I was so stupid. I just- I just wanted a _family_ and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want me to be a part of his.”

He shrugged, stuffing his hands back into his pockets. “In the words of the philosopher Jagger-.”

She laughed, the sound bright and free. “Shut up, Danny!”

He pushed a drooping branch upwards even as she ducked her head, still laughing. She was laughing and laughing until she suddenly wasn’t.

“Grace?” He collided into her but she barely seemed to notice. “Gracie, what’s- oh _fuck.”_

It was spring and they were in a park, which of course meant spring weddings, and they’d had enough luck to avoid them – or rather, Daniel had been keeping an eye out and carefully steered Grace away from any wedding-related events when he could – but it seemed like their streak of luck had come to an end.

It was a simple ceremony, a bride and a groom coming together under a gazebo, faces upturned and full of love. Grace’s breathing was ragged and irregular as she continued to stare, the white of her eyes showing around those ocean-blue irises. Daniel shoved his way between them, taking her by the shoulders and lightly shaking her.

“Grace? Gracie, look at me. _Look at me,_ Gracie, come on, do this for me, okay, I know you can-.”

Her breaths were harsh and gasping, getting shorter and shorter in between as tears began to swell.

“Sit down and breath with me,” he said, not even caring about a bench this time. He dumped his suit jacket on the ground to pillow her head and let her feet rest elevated on his thigh. “C’mon, darling, breath with me.”

It took entirely too long for Daniel to think of the cellphone tucked away in Grace’s pocket – he hadn’t used one of his own in almost a year.

“Hello, 911, what’s your emergency?”

He immediately rattled off the park address. “My friend is having a panic attack,” he babbled. “She has PTSD and a history of panic attacks but she’s been getting better and- oh my god she’s turning blue. Okay, okay, Gracie, breathe with me,” he said, dropping the phone to take her hand and press it to his chest. “Gracie, please, breath with me,” he begged.

He could hear sirens in the distance.

“Darling, please, I’m right here.”

There were tears trailing down her face and he’d never wanted to see that look on her face again, that same desperation from that Night.

“No, Gracie, no,” he sobbed, “I’m right here, just keep breathing with me, deep, steady breaths, please-.”

“Sir? Sir, we’ve got it from here, we need you to step aside.”

Daniel whirled around to give that meddling bastard a piece of his mind, only to come face-to-face with an EMT’s uniform. He scrambled out of the way but Grace’s nails sunk into his arm and he bit back a yell.

“She- won’t let me go,” he said. “Could I stay?”

And if that wasn’t a metaphor for their relationship, he didn’t know what was.

“Sir, could I know your relationship with the patient?”

“I’m her-.”

_Dead, drunk pervert of a brother-in-law._

“I’m her Danny.”

* * *

He went from a panic attack in the park to an existential crisis in the hospital. The EMTs thankfully hadn’t tried to separate them, even if Daniel had no identification on him. It likely had to do with Grace being the last Le Domas and even if he’d resented his family in the past, he was so goddamned grateful for the privileges it extended now.

Then again, he couldn’t even begin to understand what had happened, let alone how it happened. He was ravenous and awfully parched, but he could at least take care of the latter with the water dispenser in Grace’s private room.

He needed to focus on Grace first and foremost; his own existence or lack thereof could come later. Thankfully, the orderly on duty had reassured him that all Grace needed was an IV and she could be discharged once she woke.

Daniel picked up her hand, marvelling that he even could, and pressed it to his lips.

“…ny?”

“Grace!” he exclaimed, perking up. “You’re awake.”

Her lashes fluttered open, revealing the captivating blue of her eyes.

“Do you remember? We were at the park and you had a panic attack.”

Her fingers fumbled on his arm, finding no grip on the bandage covering the divots she’d dug into him earlier. “Danny, you’re here,” she mumbled. “You’re _here.”_

“Yeah,” he said, scrubbing at the side of his face. “I’m not sure how, but yeah.”

“You’re really here,” she said again. “I’m not dreaming?”

“I mean, the EMTs could see me, and the orderly on duty, and I’m going to have to page the nurse to get someone in here to take a look at you so you can get discharged, so you can see for yourself. Let me get you some water and then get on with that.”

The IV was in the back of Grace’s right hand, which meant that she had to hold the cup with her left. Daniel watched her glare at the plastic hospital cup, her left pinky finger trembling fitfully, and just…left his hand under the base of the cup as she took small, measured sips.

“Mrs. Le Domas!”

He was probably the only one who caught the way she flinched. He also felt the way her attention abruptly sharpened when the doctor turned to face him and gave very explicit instructions about Grace’s care. Daniel glanced at her and lightly nudged the bottom of the cup in question. She shook her head and he nodded, replacing the cup on the bedside table.

“You mentioned that Mrs. Le Domas had a history of panic attacks, Mr…Danny?”

Grace’s eyes crinkled.

“Yeah,” he replied. “We- I mean, she still regularly sees a therapist - Dr. Huong Tran?”

The doctor nodded, jotting something down on his notepad. “I see. There shouldn’t be any complications. If you’d like, I can start processing your discharge.”

Daniel glanced over at Grace, smiling when she nodded.

“Yes, please.

“Oh, right,” he said after the doctor had left, digging into his pockets to produce her phone, “here you go. I used it to call the ambulance. You can call Dr. Tran-.”

Grace took her phone and set it aside. “That’s fine, it can wait till tomorrow,” she said. She still hadn’t taken her eyes off him. “And if I forget, you’ll remind me, won’t you?”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “I think that’s my line. And I think it’s more accurate to say that I’ll annoy you into remembering.”

She smiled, small and private and impish. “You are very good at being annoying.”

“My whole family could have attested to that, multiple times over.”

Daniel got them a taxi, but Grace told the driver to head downtown.

“Um, excuse me, sick person?”

“We both know I’m not actually sick,” she retorted. “As fond as I am of you in your wedding suit, you’d think you’d like a change of clothes after-.” She faltered, scrambling for her phone to stare at the display.

“Grace?”

“It’s been a year,” she whispered, “I can’t believe it’s been a whole fucking year.”

Daniel bit his lip, hesitating, before gingerly placing his arm over Grace’s shoulders, leaving it open if she wanted- oh, okay, she did. It was a relief for him, too, to feel her slight weight against his chest and feel her warmth seeping into him. He pressed his nose to her crown, inhaling deeply.

“Now that you mention it…”

He hadn’t felt uncomfortable in his suit as a ghost because- well, he hadn’t felt much of anything as a ghost, but it really was kind of gross to have been in this suit since that Night, even if it had, by some miracle, remained spotless and intact this entire time.

“Sweatpants,” he decided. “Sweatpants are definitely a thing.”

Grace laughed. “We’re just going to Target, so don’t break out in hives if you brush up against polyester.”

He laughed, too, lightly knocking their heads against each other. “Is this time to confess that I used to buy my work shirts from Uniqlo?”

“I’m honestly more impressed that you even know what Uniqlo is,” she said frankly.

“It used to piss Charity off,” he admitted. “She said she was allergic to the quality – or lack thereof.”

“Fucking rich people.”

Daniel hacked out a laugh. “Darling, I don’t have a penny to my name.” He didn’t even really have a name. “You _are_ the fucking rich people.”

She sighed, allowing her head to rest in the crook of his shoulder.

“Wanna do something about that?”

“Yeah, I think it’s time,” she murmured. “I’ve been avoiding it all this while…”

“I’d call it less avoiding and more putting it on the back-burner. Priorities. You had more important things to consider.”

“I have you to consider,” she said.

“I’ll be fine,” he replied. “I always am.”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna cut it anymore, Danny boy,” Grace drawled. “You’ve been taking care of me this entire time. I’m just paying it forward.”

He shook his head. “That’s not-.”

Grace raised her scarred hand to touch the side of his neck. Daniel gasped, his hand flying up to cover her own.

“She shot me,” he said blankly. “How could I forget?”

It was as if he was reliving the entire experience all over again, from the initial bite in his neck to the disbelieving shock and then the relentless pain. He didn’t remember falling, only the sudden view of the ceiling overhead rapidly growing murkier. He’d tried not to choke on his own blood or on the taste of iron flooding his mouth, optimum word being ‘try’; he was pretty sure he’d failed miserably.

Grace squeezed his hand weakly with her own. “You were occupied,” she said. “Being dead for a year takes a lot out of you.”

He snorted. “How positively _charitable_ of you.”

Grace snorted louder.

“For that, you’re getting Y-fronts.”

“Wait, what? I thought I was the pervert between the 2 of us!”


	2. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Epilogue is longer than the Main Story and they still can't get their shit together enough to have sex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to preface this with the admission that I know absolute jackshit about inheritance laws or estates or therapy and am making this up on the fly.

Grace was too kind to say ‘I told you so’ to his face, but she’d told him so.

He was very much not fine.

Somehow, over the course of a year, he’d forgotten how to live like a human despite having watched over Grace that entire time.

“Oh my god, you constipated arsehole-.”

“As a matter of fact, my arsehole _is_ currently constipated – or I suppose rectum would be more accurate-.”

“Oh my god!”

His crowning moment of stupidity was when he exhaled and promptly forgot to breathe in again after.

The one benefit about having a completely new body was that it had no memories; death really had kicked him off the liquid diet cold turkey without any of the aftereffects of withdrawal, even. Their first big fight came about when he wanted to start drinking again.

“I have been drunk since 2009,” he said flatly, gesturing around with a half-empty bottle of scotch. “If anything, I have a whole year to make up for.”

Grace didn’t say anything for a long moment, just clenched her fists together, her left pink twitching weakly.

“If you’re so bent on killing yourself,” she said, “I have Xanax in my medicine cabinet. Go ahead, it makes less of a mess that way. I’m just…I’m just gonna go.”

She walked straight out the door. Daniel didn’t even think she realised she hadn’t put her shoes on.

“ _Fuck!”_

He then forgot _his_ shoes when he ran after her. He also forgot how fucking useless bare feet were on hot asphalt, and so had Grace. They were these 2 grown-arse adults, hopping from foot to foot outside their apartment building, hissing and swearing like fucking dumbarses.

“We’re both so fucking stupid,” he said, wiping his eyes. He hadn’t realised when he’d started to cry.

“If you’re just going to leave I wish you’d never come back,” Grace said, staring at him with those ponderously blue eyes, red-rimmed and hooded.

He held her hands, unwilling to push for any more. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m a fuck-up; we both knew that from the start.”

“You don’t think I’m fucked up too?” she hissed, pulling one hand from his grasp so she could stab him in the chest with a finger. “But the whole point is that we have this second chance to get better.”

“I’m trying,” he said, clutching at her one remaining hand. “I’ll try harder.”

Grace threaded her free hand through his hair. He made a sound and chased her touch, craving, ravenous, after a year of nothing.

“You have saved me again and again and again,” she said. “Maybe it’s selfish, but I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“No, no, Gracie, no,” he moaned, uncertainly touching her shoulder. She pressed her face into his neck at the opposite side of his scar and hugged him around the waist. That much physical contact felt like a sudden rush of acid. “Grace, you saved yourself. Don’t- don’t shortchange yourself. You would’ve done just fine without me.”

“Shut up and don’t tell me what I’m thinking,” Grace growled into his throat. He shuddered at the feel of her lips against his skin. “I’m a fucking mess who is slightly less fucked because of you. I’ll be selfish if I have to, but I refuse to lose you, too.”

“There’s nothing selfish about you.”

Grace pulled back enough to smile at him, wry. “We bonded over my wanting to live at the expense of the rest of your family,” she said. “If that isn’t selfish, I don’t know what is.”

“My family was a fucking shitshow. Even if they’d-,” and he couldn’t even say the words, choked on them before they’d even left his mouth, “-they weren’t ever going to stop. Someone had to burn it all down.”

The words hung like echoes in the air before he realised just where he’d heard them before.

Grace stared back at him for a long moment before sighing and pushing a hand through her hair. “Don’t sell yourself short, Danny. _You_ did that. _You_ burnt it all down.”

“No, if you hadn’t-.”

“You gotta stop putting me on a pedestal. It’s not fair to either of us.”

“I don’t think I-.”

She speared him with a flat look.

“I don’t,” he said weakly. “…do I?”

“You have to accept responsibility for your actions that Night, Danny.”

“I do!” he burst out. “I could’ve done so much more-.”

Grace jabbed him with her finger again. “You _helped_ me. You chose _me._ You were the only one who did. _You_ burnt it all down, Danny, _that’s_ what you did.”

She gripped his hand in hers and he could feel her twitching left pinky. “That’s okay; I’ll keep telling you until you get it, too.”

“Could we go upstairs, watch really shitty reality TV, and eat enough pizza to put us into a coma?” he asked. “I would- I would really prefer to watch someone else struggle with their existence for a change.”

He realised what he’d said a moment after he’d said it but Grace only laughed.

“I’m behind on Hell’s Kitchen,” was her reply as she started to walk back into the building, still holding onto his hand. “Alex hated watching it with me.”

“I think I went to one of Gordon Ramsey’s restaurants once,” Daniel said. It was quite novel, being towed along by Grace. What was that Bond movie with the twink? _A grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap._ He was definitely old, not quite grand. He kinda felt like if she let go he was liable to float right up into the atmosphere and then the pressure would make him explode, just like the rest of his family.

“You think?”

“Yeah, it might’ve been Charity’s idea, I don’t remember, I was drunk.”

“Of course you were,” she said, but it didn’t sound chastising, not really, anyway, and she smiled at him when she pulled him into the lift after her.

They also had to figure out his identification now that he was newly back to life, but by some miracle or other, no one seemed to recognise him as Daniel Le Domas.

“I mean, I’m more than happy to stay ‘Daniel’, but I think I’m done with the ‘Le Domas’ name.”

Grace grinned at him, impish and a little wicked. “Yeah, you’re my ‘Danny’.”

Was he- good god, he was blushing. Daniel hadn’t blushed since he was a _child._

Grace had mercy on him, though, and looked away. “Actually, about the name, I was thinking-.”

“You’re done, too?”

“I’ve been done for a while, I think,” she said dryly. “I’m about as done with it as it is with me. It’s just taken me awhile to get around to doing something about it, is all.”

“What was your maiden name?” It was kind of a travesty that he didn’t even know it.

Her lips pressed together. “It was- from my last foster family.”

He could read the words she wouldn’t say. “Something else, then. We could be Ramsays. Or Kardashians.”

Grace snorted, and then began to chortle, her hair falling out of its sloppy bun. She looked hideous; she looked alive.

“We could even use a ouij-.”

“No tempting the devil!” she exclaimed, chucking a coaster at his head. “Bad Danny!”

He caught it, frowning down at the logo for a local nightclub. “Why do we even have these things? It’s not like we use them.”

There were watermarks all over the coffee table and a particularly bad stain where they’d struggled over a box of Franzia. In hindsight he was kind of embarrassed about attemptting to drown his sorrows in _box wine,_ of all things. Grace had won that one and chucked the box straight out the window into the dumpster below only for Daniel to return from the off-license with a half-drunk bottle of McAllister’s, and they both knew how that story ended.

“Pick our favourites out of the top 10 most common American surnames?”

Grace pulled the coaster from his hand and tossed it over her shoulder before pushing and tugging him into place against the sofa arm so she could rest against him, her back to his chest. Daniel’s hands fluttered over her shoulders again but she just pulled them down, winding them over her waist. His heartbeat began to tick up; with her back pressed up against his chest, she could probably feel it, too.

“That’s a much better idea than a fucking ouijia board,” she muttered, curling against him. He bent his knees, cradling her legs between his thighs. “For fuck’s sake, Danny, and I wasn’t even the one whose family was into satan worship.”

He pressed his face into her hair, nudging more and more strands out of the old elastic band; she’d cut it after her panic attack at the park. He could hear the _taptaptap_ of her phone keyboard.

“Are you looking it up now?” he asked, drowsy with her warmth. On his bad days it was like he’d never feel anything again and he made sure to sit as close to her as he dared. Grace knew, though, she always did. She’d shove the blankets from the bedroom into his arms with a command to put them on the sofa, and then wrapped them both up in a cocoon of muggy warmth as they scrolled through Netflix’s recommended list.

It happened more frequently than he liked.

“No time like the present, right?”

Daniel sighed, nuzzling into her hair. They used the same shampoo, but it smelt different on her. “We need to check with the lawyers if a name change will disrupt access to the accounts,” he muttered. “I can’t remember what the guidelines are since everyone was so fucking proud to be a Le Domas, but I’m almost certain some of the trusts can only be accessed by someone with the family name. They’re kind of an endangered species these days.”

Grace just shrugged, jabbing him with an elbow. He was almost certain she’d done that on purpose. Daniel had learnt that she had lethal elbows and wasn’t afraid to use them.

“So we empty those out first.”

He tried to recall the bottomline on the accounts. He’d had monthly reports and account summaries regularly sent to him in the past and he'd been mostly sober when he looked them over.

“I’m not sure we can,” he said.

“We can create charities and trust funds, right?” she asked. “That sort of thing takes money-.”

“No, you don’t understand.” The account the 2 of them were currently living on had technically been her bride price and they were barely even scratching the surface, not to mention the influx from the insurance payouts on each individual family member, the family as a whole, and then the manor and grounds on top of it. Then again, their biggest expense at the moment was rent and fucking Starfucks since Grace couldn’t kick the habit and they were essentially living like college students.

Every single Le Domas had had a personal account as well as a trust, and that was just as individuals. It didn’t take into account the veritable fucking gaming empire or the investments or the bearer bonds or stock portfolio or the offshore accounts or the properties or the-.

“I’m pretty sure you’re richer than Mark Zuckerberg but poorer than Jeff Bezos. Although the stocks might’ve tanked after that Night.”

“Okay?”

Daniel sighed. “There is rich, and then there is fucking rich. It is entirely possible that you are worth more than the GDP of the entire African continent.”

Grace turned and stared.

“You could literally buy a Tesla a day for the rest of your life and not run out of money. And we _still_ wouldn’t get started on the family accounts.”

“Jesus Christ, what the fuck?”

Daniel licked his lips. “Fucking rich people. And it’s not like great-great-grandad was exactly poor, either, he just-.”

“-wanted to fuck over his descendants?”

“And be richer than god. You’re definitely worth more than the pope.”

Grace’s head thumped heavily against his sternum. “So. What does this mean?”

“I’d have to check to know for sure,” he said, “but it’s highly probable that if you change your name, you’d lose access to those accounts, and the money stays uselessly in limbo until the Federal Reserve finds a way to usurp it after you’re dead.”

“Or?”

“What?”

“Or what, Danny? I know that tone, you’ve already thought of something.”

“Or you do your damnedest to clean those accounts out anyway,” he shrugged. “I have a sneaking suspicion that those accounts were somehow linked to the pact since they never seemed to run dry, no matter how muchmy family fucked up, but maybe the rules are different now.”

“Alright. Where should we start?”

When Daniel had met Jory, he’d been waiting tables _and_ TA-ing to pay for rent and living expenses for a shitty flat near the university. MFAs didn’t make money and Jory had been looking at paying off his student debt for at least the next 30 years, but he’d loved what he’d done – he’d loved _life,_ period, and did his best to see the glass half-full.

After Daniel had dumped him, after he’d moved all his stuff out from the flat they’d been sharing _(not_ the one Jory had been living in at the start of his MFA), he’d put Jory’s name on the property titler, paid off every last cent of his student loans, and then vanished into his cups for the next 2 years. By the time he'd resurfaced, Jory had finished his degree, sold the flat, and moved straight across the country…but he was working his dream job and his smile was almost the same as the one Daniel had fallen in love with.

“Student debt, women’s health, global warming, LGBTQ rights, education, racism, gun control, homelessness, did I miss anything?”

He ticked them off his fingers, ignoring the way Grace’s smile was broadening.

“Daniel Le Domas, are you a _liberal?”_ she squealed. “Also, the irony of you talking about gun control is _hilarious.”_

He shrugged. “Black sheep of the family, remember?”

She turned around to hug him, arms linked around the back of his neck.

“Let’s get you a name,” she said, their cheeks pressed together, “and then let’s get started.”

  
  


In the end he didn’t choose any of the top 10 most common surnames in America. A quick chat with the lawyers and a small sum later and he was legally Daniel River Pond. He even got his university degree and CPA back.

Grace began bleating the moment she heard what he’d chosen.

“Oh my god, you’re such a fucking nerd!”

“Shut up, I went to a liberal arts college and my first boyfriend was a giant pothead and a linguistics major, okay?”

“Wait, so are you-?”

“I’m pretty sure Charity would’ve pegged me if I’d asked, but there was no way in hell I would’ve ever trusted her with that.”

Grace blinked. “…not what I asked, but okay.”

He took pity on her and said, “Bisexual fits, I suppose.”

“Did you have other girlfriends?” she asked.

“Other boyfriends, too,” he said. “I paid a drag queen to come home with me once.”

Grace choked on her saliva. He thumped her back as she coughed, face going red and tears springing to her eyes. It probably wasn’t helped by the way she was trying to cough and laugh at the same time.

“Please tell me you have pictures,” she wheezed. “Their _faces!”_

“Especially since at 18 I was a fucking weed and she was 35 and had biceps the size of my head.”

Grace threw her head back and _cackled._

If the lawyers resented him coming in and mucking up their accounts, they were paid enough not to show it, at least. He did a little happy dance when he was surrounded by numbers, sober, for the first time in years.

“You really like numbers, huh?” she murmured, those big blue eyes of hers as warm as a summer day. You could get lost in eyes like that. Alex certainly had. Daniel, though…

“I was good at it,” he said instead. “Numbers don’t…lie. They don’t pretend. It was the one place my family couldn’t touch ‘cause they didn’t know jackshit.”

She put her hand on his forearm. “Whatever makes you happy.” She paused. “I’m pretty sure since I have more money than god I can customise a dildo in the shape of pi if you’d like-.”

Daniel was almost certain the family lawyers thought they were both insane by the end of that visit. After he did the math, he came up with, “$84.3 billion.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“$84.3 billion.”

Grace scrunched up a face. “How many millions are there in a billion?”

“A thousand.”

Her jaw dropped.

“And there’s-.”

“84.3 of them, yeah.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, you’re definitely richer than him.”

“What the fucking fuck.”

“I mean, the corporation’s sort of floating along all on its own, and I don’t think you want to put people out of a job-.”

“No, no, of course not,” Grace stammered.

“Then there’s the…vehicles? I don’t know what you’d call this list,” he said, passing over a sheet.

“ _2 private jets?”_

“Aunt Helene didn’t share.”

“ _7_ yachts? What is that, one for each of you?”

Daniel squinted. “Sounds about right. I mean, we could sell them, but that would just bring in more cash, even if we sell them below market value. Besides, the only people who could afford the maintenance on jets and yachts are-”

“The fucking rich, yeah, I got it,” she sighed. “Um. How about if we did, like, a partnership with hospitals or the Make-a-Wish foundation?”

“Those are pretty different things,” he replied.

“Make-a-Wish is pretty self-explanatory, right?” Grace said. “Hospitals in case of a medical emergency and they can’t get a commercial flight in time?”

“Hospitals usually employ helicopters, which is one thing we shockingly don’t have,” he thought aloud. “There’s usually a pretty significant distance between airports and hospitals, even private ones.” He bit his lip when he saw her shoulders sag. “It was a good idea, though! We can think of something else along those lines.”

“But we can’t do this alone,” she said. “We don’t have enough expertise on a lot of these things.”

Daniel shrugged. “You wanted to use up some of that money, right? So we employ people with said expertise to do these things for us.”

She smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

He smiled back. “Yeah?”

Her smile widened. “Yeah.”

Grace also wanted to give him full access to all the accounts.

“Look, it’s only practical.”

“I’ve been wearing Walmart boxers for months now and haven’t combusted yet. You don’t have to-.”

“I don’t understand how to move and manipulate numbers the way you do,” she told him. “It’s the truth; you know these accounts better than anyone. And it’s not as if we both don’t agree on what the money is going to be used for.”

He glanced away. “I don’t know, I just-.”

“I know you’re not going to clean out the accounts the moment my back is turned and leave me high and dry so I’m not worried about that,” she said tartly. “I don’t know why you are. If there’s something I’ve learnt about these accounts from you is that it’s virtually impossible for one person to use up all this money on their own no matter how hard they tried.”

 _It feels like you’re pushing me away,_ he couldn’t say.

“Would it make you feel better if you could only access your old accounts?” she offered. “I need you to be able to handle the others, but if you could only access- I dunno, is that even possible?”

“Yes,” he immediately replied. “I think. I’ll find a way. You can even keep Charity’s account; I’m charitable that way.”

Grace snorted. “Yeah, sure,” she muttered, combing a hand through her hair. She still seemed surprised when she ran out of hair just past her shoulders. “Danny, just because you’re going to have a credit line again doesn’t mean that things have to change because they really, really don’t.”

Those were the words he didn’t even know he needed to hear.

“…it’s gonna be weird though, not having a private jet anymore. I don’t think I’ve ever flown commercial in my life.”

“Fucking rich people.”

Daniel winked at her. “Right back atcha, darling.”

  
  


In the following week, Grace introduced him to Dr. Tran in a joint session as someone she’d met in a counselling session, a friend who’d come from a background similar to the Le Domas and barely survived an attempted murder.

“The scar really sells it,” he’d drawled in the waiting room, knocking their ankles together.

“We should make up stories for when people inevitably ask us where the scars are from,” she replied. “Something else instead of ‘my nephew-in-law shot me point-blank and then I accidentally stabbed the wound through a rusty nail’. Maybe an industrial accident? But those are boring – maybe while I was trying to feed a particularly vicious stork?”

Daniel snickered. “You misjudged the distance of your boba straw.”

Grace giggled. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Murder by spouse is boooooring. Everyone’s a victim.”

He wrinkled his nose. “I can’t tell if she had really good aim or really shitty aim. Like, I bled out, right? But only after-.”

“She had really shitty aim if she was going for a headshot? But really good aim if she wanted you to suffer, I guess,” Grace replied, reaching up to lightly trace the lines on his neck. “But these don’t really look like they’re from a bullet wound, so I think you can get creative.”

“Oh?” he grinned.

“Like trained pigeon-creative.”

Daniel started snickering again. “A moray eel tried to give me a hickey.”

“How amorous,” Grace sniggered, and then they both made the mistake of looking at each other.

“It’s _amor-.”_

They both burst out laughing, hissing and shushing each other in an attempt to be quiet in the horrified silence of Dr. Tran's waiting room, wheezing for breath.

“Grace and Daniel?”

He held up a hand to ask for a moment, seeing as how they were still too busy falling over themselves laughing.

“Aren’t- aren’t we early?” he panted, wiping the corners of his eyes only to see Dr. Tran standing in front of them with her patently mild smile. It was only a little jarring to see her in the flesh, even if she didn’t know he’d been attending Grace’s sessions with her for the last 9 months. Besides, it wasn’t as if Grace didn’t tip the equivalent of another session each time.

“Yes, but my previous patient cancelled on account of the 2 people discussing gunshot wounds in the waiting room,” Dr. Tran replied, her smile turning wry.

Daniel glanced at Grace – and they both burst out laughing again.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped, “we’ll- we’ll be right with you, just give us a minute.”

“Take all the time you need,” Dr. Tran said, her voice calm and unhurried. “It’s rare enough to see such joviality within these walls that I’ve learnt to treasure it when it comes by.”

She eventually managed to get them settled in her office. Daniel guzzled down a glass of water, still marvelling at its cool refreshing taste before sinking onto the sofa beside Grace, close enough that their legs were entirely pressed together from hip to calf, ankles loosely looped over each other. Dr. Tran’s placid gaze didn’t miss a tick.

“It’s rare that I have joint sessions for persons who aren’t together,” she remarked.

He glanced at Grace, sinking his teeth into his lip. He wasn’t ever going to push her into anything she didn’t want, not that he thought she’d let him.

“We’re not a couple but we are together,” was her answer. “Entirely, hopelessly, codependently together.” Daniel was pretty sure he had a stupidly goofy smile on his face at the end of her little speech.

“Sounds about right,” he added.

“And how long have the 2 of you been together?” Dr. Tran asked.

“Just after you got out of the hospital?” he murmured to Grace.

She laughed humourlessly, running a hand through her hair. “God, I was such a mess.”

“Not like I was much better,” he countered.

“Was this before or after you switched to Dr. Shepherd, Grace?”

Grace’s face darkened. “He didn’t have anything worthwhile to say.”

“Grace?”

He carefully took her hand in his. She clutched back almost immediately, pinky fluttering against his own.

“He didn’t have anything worthwhile to say,” she repeated, gaze fixed ahead.

Daniel frowned, thinking back to that time. He’d still been a ghost, but Dr. Tran had been her therapist as long as he- oh. It took him entirely too long to get it.

“It’s because of me,” he told Dr. Tran. “I didn’t take what he had to say very well so I tried to kill myself a few times.”

Grace’s mouth was pressed into a thin, bloodless line.

“It’s good to see that you look better, now,” Dr. Tran said, and she seemed genuine. She had that charm about her, asincerity that made it seem like she really cared.

“Well, it didn’t take, obviously,” he said sardonically. “One would think they really don’t want me down there.”

Grace squeezed his hand. “That makes 2 of us.”

“Wait, what? No,” he exclaimed.

“Pedestals, Danny boy,” she retorted.

He winced. “I don’t think that’s-.”

Grace raised an eyebrow.

“Look, he judged us and found us all wanting.”

“Except you,” she insisted. “You came back, Danny. You came back to me.”

He shrugged. “I did say I wasn’t wanted down there. Can’t say I’d miss it much.” After having heard how things had ended, he honestly hadn’t wanted to meet anyone from his family ever again, not even Alex. Maybe especially not Alex; he’d loved his brother _so damn much._ It made the betrayal bite so much more.

“You’re not his anymore,” Grace growled. “You’re not even your family’s, Danny, you’re _mine.”_

He looked at her, absently wondering why Dr. Tran was sitting there watching them like they were the Late Night Show, but he supposed this semi-coded conversation they were having was exposing all sorts of hidden neuroses and fuck-ups.

Daniel sighed, sinking back into the sofa, Grace having pulled their joint hands to rest on top of her thigh. “Well, if I had to be someone’s, I’m glad to be yours.”

She beamed at him, unabashedly joyful.

“You fucking weirdo. I can’t believe you’re so damned happy to be the lesser of two? Three? Weevils.”

She cackled at him. “Well, you’re a fucking nerd!” she crowed back. “I can’t believe you watched that damn movie.”

“I didn’t,” he reluctantly confessed. “Jory had this huge boner for Paul Bettany, alright? I fell asleep like 10 minutes in, it was boring as fuck, but he kept _quoting_ the damn thing-.”

“Worse things could’ve stuck.”

  
  


“Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

He glanced at her over the top of his sunglasses, pushing up the stupid straw hat she’d bought him that he wore just because it made her smile. And maybe also because his W.A.S.P.-white skin burnt like the summer sun was the fires of hell, particularly his scalp. 40 years on this godforsaken earth and he’d never known that about himself. Then again, in all 40 years of his life, he hadn’t exactly spent that long in the sun, either, sprawled out with his head in Grace’s lap as he whined about the pain.

He’d never had someone care about his burnt scalp before.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, taking an obnoxious slurp of his iced Venti chai tea latte with 4 shots of espresso. Grace had made him go through the entire Starfucks menu to find a drink that he could tolerate without wanting to kill himself, claiming that she hadn’t had a choice when he’d been a ghost, but drinking by herself was just sad. At first he’d tried adding 5 shots of espresso since he was certain he’d read somewhere that ‘venti’ meant 5-

(Grace nearly fell off her chair, she was laughing so hard.

“You dumb fuck,” she cackled at him, “venti in Italian means 20 ‘cause there are 20 ounces in a Venti!” She laughed and laughed and laughed as he sat there pouting, jittery with how much caffeine he’d imbibed.)

-but 5 shots sent him bouncing off the wall so he contented himself with 4, which left him pleasantly buzzed while curbing the saccharine sweetness of the syrup Starfucks masqueraded as chai tea-

(“And how do you know what chai tea tastes like?” she’d snorted. “You asked for milk and a wedge of lemon the first time.”

“Shut up, I’m not coming here with you anymore if you’re just going to sit there and judge all my drink choices-.”

“You’re a lying liar who lies,” she’d said, but her smile was warm and she held out her hand. It was always the same one, the left one with its garish scars and fucked up fingers and it made him feel like someone he wasn’t, when he was presented with this visible sign of her trusting him with her weakness.

Or maybe she just wanted her stronger hand free to punch someone in the face, which she did on their one very short-lived attempt at a night out and some fucker wouldn’t take no for an answer.)

-so he’d joined her in her abysmal Starfucks addiction, although he wouldn’t go so far as to say he was addicted. This concoction was…palatable, that’s all.

If Grace just smiled knowingly at him when he said that, well…

She took a large breath, exhaling upwards to blow her bangs out of her face. She’d cut them at the start of the summer and had regretted it almost every day since. He’d stopped by Claire’s yesterday and suffered through the salesgirls cooing over him to buy her a selection of pins, barrettes, and headbands, all of which she’d forgotten while rushing out the door this morning. He’d pocketed a bobby pin just for this occasion and held it out to her.

She grinned as she took the pin and pulled her hair out of the way, deftly twisting it into place.

“Thanks,” she said. “I just wanted to know – you said your mum and Helene were sisters, right?”

Daniel nodded, eyebrows raised. He hadn’t realised she was still curious about his family.

“So what the fuck was that accent and why the hell was she the only one who had it?”

He snorted at her bluntness. Charmed, honestly.

“You could tell Aunt Helene was older, right?”

Grace nodded.

“My granduncle Patrick got married late and Mum was only a toddler at the time, so Aunt Helene pushed for her to be sent to live with some relatives till things calmed down.”

“Jesus Christ, there are more of you?” she exclaimed.

He laughed at her outrage. “No, no, the Van Horns were- they lived just outside of Savannah and they were fucking racist-.”

“Of course they fucking were,” Grace muttered to herself.

“-and Mum ended up staying with them for almost a decade, ‘cause Granduncle Patrick lost a few screws when his fiancée left him at the goat pit-.”

“Seriously? She didn’t even make it to the-”

“Are you going to keep interrupting me?” he demanded.

Grace put her index finger over her mouth and smiled beatifically at him, opening those blue eyes of hers wide. She knew he was an absolute sucker for that look of hers and used it against him ruthlessly.

Daniel just sniffed at her. “Yeah, so Mum stayed with the Van Horns for her formative years and came back with an archery hobby and an accent Aunt Helene abhorred.”

Grace hummed. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think I ever saw Helene speak to your mum.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Aunt Helene _hated_ the accent. And the Van Horns, but they were the only ones who could take Mum in at such short notice, and Aunt Helene had cared enough about Mum to want her out of the way.”

“Your fucking family,” she muttered, swiping her straw through the heap of whipped cream on top of her espresso frappe. “What happened to the Van Horns?”

“I told you they lived in Savannah, right?”

“You said they lived just outside of it.”

“Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe,” he said. “You know the song ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’?”

Grace’s eyes went wide for an entirely different reason this time. “No,” she whispered, the drama of it ruined by the whipped cream on her lip.

Daniel shrugged. “Yeah, so the devil made a pitstop a few years ago before heading up our way.” He offered a faint smile before touching his lip. “You have a little- here.” He reached out to smear the cream away from her mouth. She leant into his touch, patently unafraid.

He glanced down at his thumb thoughtfully before sticking it into his own mouth.

Grace raised an eyebrow at him.

“If we both get diabetes, I’m going to blame you for the rest of our lives.”

She laughed in his face.

  
  


Grace’s flat was a single bedroom with a decent-sized kitchen and an open-concept living-dining room. She could’ve afforded a penthouse downtown – she could’ve afforded _several_ penthouses downtown – but she’d settled in this matchbox after being discharged from the hospital the first time and had just never left.

Even when Daniel had followed her home for the first time in the flesh, after she’d been discharged from the hospital for the second time, he’d thought things had to change now that he was corporeal. But Grace had just shrugged and told him there shouldn’t be a difference between him having the run of her flat while he was a ghost or a person.

“I am literally in your space,” he protested.

“You were always in my space,” she shot back. “I never minded before; I’m not going to mind now.”

“Grace-.”

“Danny.” She shoved him into the bathroom. “Go and wash first and then we’ll talk after.”

He didn’t even think to lock the door and couldn’t feel surprised at the dryer-warm undershirt and boxers on the counter.

“I can’t help but feel a little underdressed,” he joked as he emerged from the bathroom, rubbing at the corner of his jaw.

Grace put her hands on her hips and just looked at him, a wry smile on her face. “It is a little weird,” she agreed. “I kind’ve forgot what you looked like in clothes other than your wedding suit. It’s almost like you were a Ken doll.”

“Batteries not included,” he quipped and she laughed.

“Come on,” Grace said, beckoning. “Let’s talk.”

He thought they would go sit on the sofa but she led them straight into her bedroom. Daniel felt a little awkward and hovered in the doorway, even after she’d sat on her bed.

“You’ve been in here before.”

“When I could float through the door, yeah,” he said, ruffling his hair. They’d get caught up talking sometimes and he’d sit on the floor beside her bed, keeping up the conversation. Or he’d swoop in, yelling her awake for an appointment or out of a nightmare. Thankfully, the former happened much more often than the latter these days.

“Don’t be an idiot and just come in.”

He hesitated again at the foot of her bed, but Grace took his hand and pulled him down so they were lying parallel to each other. She kicked up the covers from where they were at their feet, tugging them around their shoulders.

“Grace-.”

“Danny, it’s okay,” she coaxed. “I want you here.”

Here, in bed with his dead brother’s wife.

“You know why it’s not ex-wife,” she said, answering the question he hadn’t even realised he’d asked.

He sighed, letting himself sink into the first mattress he’d laid on in a year, feeling the weight of his all-too-human limbs weigh him down.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Grace,” he confessed, voice little more than a whisper.

“Who the fuck cares, Danny?” she whispered back, wriggling closer so that she could put his arm over her waist and pull him closer, their faces a hair’s breadth apart. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing either. And considering your family thought they knew what they were doing? I don’t think that’s much of a problem.”

“Are you going to keep using my shitty family as an excuse?”

“If the shoe fits.”

He chuckled wetly, closing his eyes and daring to curl closer to her warmth. His damp hair was soaking into her pillow, saturating them in the fragrance of her shampoo. Grace sniffed.

“That’s my shampoo.”

Daniel opened his eyes. “Yeah,” he said cautiously, “I’m afraid they didn’t exactly have ghost shampoo where I was at.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she said, frowning. “You _only_ used the shampoo?”

“I used your body wash, too?” Cucumber and aloe vera, very moisturising, according to the bottle. “I know I’m a guy, but I’ve at least evolved past 2-in-1.”

“Oh my god, the 2 in 2-in-1 does _not_ mean what you think it does!” she exclaimed. “Didn’t you use the conditioner?”

He stared at her blankly. “The what?”

“ _Oh my god.”_

That evening, she dragged him down to Aesop, ignoring his confusion at the lack of books, and made him sniff things until he found some scents that were acceptable to them both.

“We can use these after we’re done with the current stuff,” Grace said, looking straight ahead. “I thought about taking you to Walmart or Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but I decided to have mercy on you.”

“Okay?” he asked, beyond confused at this point.

“Make yourself useful and carry the bottles,” she ordered. “Be careful; they’re glass, but we can bring them back once we’re done for a refill.”

“I don’t understand,” he said truthfully.

She finally looked up at him. “Conditioner is something you put on your hair after you shower to keep it soft,” she said, reaching up to lightly card her fingers through his curls, smiling faintly as she tugged. “See? They’re all crunchy. That wouldn’t have been the case if you’d put some conditioner in.”

“Things I never knew,” he hummed.

“Come on,” she said, dropping her hand to hold his. “Let’s go get you a razor. Did you try to use mine?”

He snorted, letting her pull him out the door. “I didn’t dare.”

“Good boy.”

When they reached home, 2 paper bags heavier, the washer-dryer was beeping, a bright light blinking.

“Oh, good,” Grace hummed, kicking her shoes off. “Put those down and come here, will you?”

Daniel carefully set the bags down by the door and obeyed, curious. “What’s up?”

“Laundry,” she said, pointing. “Take it out, put it on the bed, and fold it.”

“Okay, confession time,” he said, holding his hands up. “I’m as much a maid as Cora, Tina, and Dora were.”

Grace smirked at him. “Am I going to like the way you dance?”

“You’ve seen me dance.”

“Yeah, could use some work,” she said. “Laundry, come on, before it wrinkles.”

He’d seen her do this, so he knew to open the door and pull out its contents, only to blink at the familiar T-shirts, sweatpants, and boxers. “This is…”

“Shoo,” Grace said, herding him into her bedroom. “Lay it on the bed. You’ve seen me do this, haven’t you?”

He knew to shake the clothes out so that they lay in a flat, neat stack.

“Okay, start folding,” she continued. “In half, and then half again, and again.”

“I feel like I have some leeway with this part,” Daniel said. “I’ve seen how you fold your clothes.”

“Arsehole,” she laughed, pretending to swat him. “Here, I cleared a couple of drawers for you. I’ll move some more stuff around tomorrow, but it should fit everything for now.”

These were all the material possessions he had in the world, and he hadn’t even been the one to buy them. Jory had been the last person to clear a drawer for him, before they’d moved in together. Charity hadn’t even asked, had remodelled her suite in the penthouse they’d shared to expand her walk-in closet; Daniel vaguely remembered checking into a hotel for the entire renovation period, living off the expansive hotel bar.

“You cleared me a drawer.”

“They’re clean clothes,” Grace said reasonably. “You’re not going to leave them in the washer or on the floor.”

Coming back to life was _exhausting,_ and he was absolutely wiped after stocking his new drawer. Even Grace looked to be drooping, and he recalled that she’d had a panic attack earlier that day.

“Sleep?”

“Sleep sounds like a brilliant idea,” she said. She had a spare toothbrush for him and they jostled for space over her tiny washbasin. Daniel was convinced Grace only won because of her stabby elbows. When they were done, he put a hand on her squishy sofa.

“Goodni-.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Danny,” she murmured, towing him along into her room. To this day he still wasn’t certain if his lack of resistance was out of confusion or true desire.

“Grace.”

Those big blue eyes were staring straight at him, faintly reproachful, utterly soulful.

“Go to sleep, Danny,” she said, pushing him in and climbing in from the other side. They found themselves mirroring the same position of the afternoon and his pillow was still slightly damp.

Grace tucked her head under his chin and put her arm over his waist. Only then did he feel comfortable reciprocating the gesture.

“Goodnight, Danny,” she said.

“Goodnight, Gracie,” he murmured, savouring the heat of her in his arms. He closed his eyes and woke up choking on his own blood.

“Danny! _Danny!_ Danny, wake _up!”_

He choked, hand flying for his throat, only to encounter dry skin. Grace was on top of him, her face screwed up in a horrifyingly familiar way.

“Wake up, Danny! You’re here, you’re safe.”

He latched onto her, trembling.

“You’re safe, you’re okay.”

He hadn’t had a single nightmare in the year he’d haunted her steps.

“I’m so sorry,” he whimpered. “Grace, I’m so sorry.” His chest seized up, black spots appearing in his vision before a sharp pain on his face snapped his head to the side.

“ _Breathe,_ you idiot!” Grace was crying now, too, shaking his shoulders.

He gasped, lungs burning as fresh, cool air rushed down his throat. “Oh my god,” he moaned, _"oh my god,_ did I- did I actually forget-.”

“Stay with me, Danny,” she whispered in his ear, “stay with me.”

He could only cling back to her, hands shaking and probably too rough on her slim body, but she never said a word of complaint.

“I’m a fucking mess,” he rasped, his voice raw and pained.

“You’re not any worse than I am, Danny,” Grace murmured, threading her fingers through his hair. He made an animal sound, rolling into her touch.

In the following weeks he’d joke about how they had nightly screaming matches, only their enemies were in their dreams. The one time he offered to take the sofa, thinking their night terrors just exacerbated each other, she’d screamed at him while they were both awake and threw a pillow in his face.

“Just- stay,” she’d whimpered, clinging to him. “That’s all you need to do, you fucking arsehole.”

“God, with an invitation that charming, how could I ever turn it down?” he whispered back, bundling her up in his arms.

He never wanted to crowd Grace or make her feel uncomfortable, but it was difficult to be careful when he couldn’t predict how they’d wake up. Sleep-Daniel gravitated to her heat like he was trying to make up for the year he’d been without it and they woke up tangled together more often than not.

It took his cock long enough to get with the programme that he was mildly terrified it never would, only for it to sit the fuck up and get with the programme all too well.

“I don’t want to make this awkward,” he winced, easing his hips away from hers.

Grace grumbled adorably, pulling his arms over her shoulders. He hadn’t even realised when her smell – _their_ smell, of washing detergent and body products, because they used nearly all of the same, had become the smell of home. It was arousing as much as it was comforting.

“It’s flattering, you fucker.”

Daniel bit his lip, trying not to squirm. “We’re both grown adults. For fuck’s sake, we were both married.”

She rolled her head back enough to look him in the eye. There was sleep dust crusted at the corner of it that he gently wiped away. “Thank you. And your point is?”

“You don’t want- you don’t need to deal with it.”

Daniel was 40-years-old and felt like he was still just as awkward as he’d been when he was 14. The un/fortunate benefit of being flatmates practically glued together 24/7 was that there was barely anything they didn’t know about each other, up to and including her menstrual cycles – he’d even made emergency runs for pads, Midol, and Ritter Sport late at night several times now to the pharmacy down the street. It was entirely possible Grace masturbated in her occasional long baths, but for all their intimacy, their relationship had never once turned sexual.

It was quite a turnaround from how he’d shamelessly propositioned her on her wedding day, hoping to creep her out enough that she’d leave Alex.

Grace squirmed about in the circle of his arms till they were face-to-face, one hand on his shoulder, the other draped over his waist. It was a familiar position to them by now. She gazed at him, silent and calm, before reaching up with one hand to brush the side of his face with her knuckles.

He turned enough to press a kiss to her fingers. She smiled, her blue eyes glimmering in the pale dawn light.

“ _You_ don’t want to.”

He blinked. _What?_

“This is the first time you’ve gotten hard since you’ve come back, isn’t it?”

They’d been sharing a bed for months at this point, of course she’d know.

“Um. What?”

She snickered at the look on his face and pulled him into a tight hug. Thankfully, his cock had gotten with the new programme and had softened despite how they were pressed together closer than before.

“I’m curious now, Danny. You were hitting me on me so hard at the wedding, I nearly got bruises.”

He pulled back enough to look her in the face. “You really wanna talk about that now? At-.” He squinted over her shoulder. “At 6.55 in the morning. Fuck, why are we even awake?”

“Your penis woke us up,” Grace said unrepentantly. “Would you like to reschedule this conversation for the afternoon, then?”

“I’d like to reschedule it for left of never,” he muttered, relaxing enough nuzzle into her cloud of blonde hair.

The hand on his waist snuck up the back of his shirt, pressing against bare skin and he jerked, feeling electrified by that single touch.

“What would you’ve done, Danny,” she murmured.

“You would’ve never taken me up on it,” he mumbled into her hair. “You’re not the kind of person who would’ve cheated on Alex with his perverted drunk of a brother.”

He could feel the smile she pressed into the tender, tender skin of his throat. “What would you’ve done, Danny,” she murmured again.

“I wouldn’t have, okay?” he muttered, pulling away to roll onto his back, staring up at the blank ceiling. “With how drunk I was, I wouldn’t have been able to get it up anyway.”

“Huh.”

He was going to regret this. “What?”

“No, it’s just – Alex made you out to be some sort of ginormous manwhore.” To her credit, Grace sounded apologetic about it.

He sighed. “Alex and I were closest when we were younger and I fucked everything with a pulse that would let me,” he admitted. “Look, I did a lot of questionable shit when I was younger, okay? I’m not even talking about the goats or Hide & Seek or any of that fucked up family bullshit. And ‘cause I was drunk or drugged out of my mind I couldn’t even remember what I’d done and people had to tell me what the fuck had happened after.

“I stopped fucking around after Charity and I got married, but I started drinking more.” He shrugged. “She did enough fucking around for the both of us anyway. If you wanted to kill my boner, you did a damn good job of it.”

The hand that had been on his back had trailed across to rest on his chest, twitching fitfully.

“You never had sex with her?”

He snorted. “I was so damn drunk after the ceremony I was passed out in the foyer the rest of the night.”

A beat of silence. “Alex and I had sex.”

His belly curdled, but he couldn’t fully understand why. “I gathered that much, yes.”

“Like, a lot of sex. Like, we had entire weekend-long sex marathons.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do with that information.”

“I like sex, Danny,” Grace said, “and I like a lot of it.”

Present tense was a good thing, right?

She laughed lightly, which meant he’d spoken his thoughts aloud again. “I’d like to think so, yes.”

“I…liked sex, once,” he said, rolling the words over in his mind. So many of his positive associations with sex involved Jory, despite how dimmed the memories were by years and alcohol. Before that, it had just been a mess of drugs, sex, and alcohol.

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

Present tense again, this question infinitely scarier than the previous one.

Daniel shuddered, curling back on his side. Grace was still watching him with those big blue eyes of hers, almost grey in this light.

“It’s okay,” she coaxed, stroking his cheek again. He groaned, pressing into her touch.

“Could I just- could I just know one thing?” she asked, her voice wavering. Daniel opened his eyes, not even realising when he’d closed them.

“Is it- is it like, a sex-thing, or- or a me-thing, or an Alex-thing?”

The words rushed out of her like she’d been holding them in all along.

“You’ve been worrying about this awhile, haven’t you?” She made to withdraw her hand but he held her in place. He couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to not notice.

Grace snorted. If the hand on his face was trembling ever so slightly, neither of them mentioned it. “You forget that I’ve had a whole year ahead of you to deal with my own fucking headcase. That’s unfortunately left room for other things.”

“I was right there with you,” he said.

Her laughter was bitter. “You never had to deal with the physical stuff or the nightmares, though. I was so thankful and so jealous at the same time. You were always there like my fucking security blanket, and I knew that if you were there, I’d wake up safe.”

Well, that was unexpected.

“I literally stood over your bed and yelled at you until you woke up.”

“Trust me, your shouting was infinitely better.”

He considered his own nightmares, which were a regular revolution of Uncle Charles, his family dragging him down to join them in hell (he was a little uncertain how much of that was a dream and how much of that was the truth), Alex killing him, Alex killing Grace, and him giving Grace up. The last one thankfully occurred the least but it was also the worst, and he tended to wake with a pressing need to run to the bathroom and throw up everything in his stomach.

He was almost desensitised to Uncle Charles, the man having haunted him since his childhood, and he really didn’t care for what his family had to say, since it was mostly just reiterations of things they’d told him while they were still alive. He thought he’d feel _something_ for Charity – he could still recall the way she’d looked at him just before she shot him – but any feelings he might’ve had sat like ash in his belly.

When faced with his brother, Daniel didn’t really know what to think. He’d loved Alex so much and for so long, had built up this ideal of him in his head, had built up his _own_ fucked up personality in opposition to it, that he couldn’t quite bring himself to rebut all the accusations dream-Alex flung at him, about Grace, about their family, about Alex himself. He let Alex do whatever he wanted to him, and he wasn’t sure if the torture Alex put him through was a matter of creativity or masochism.

He always woke up from those dreams all out of sorts and he tended to drift through the day in a sort of foggy haze. Grace brought him to Dr. Tran one of those days, but she’d had to tell him about it the day after, he didn’t remember any of it at all.

Alex killing Grace, though.

Daniel was usually alive in those, if restrained; sometimes Charity’s bullet had hit somewhere less vital, sometimes Fitch the fucker got lucky with that fucking crossbow, giving him flashbacks to Uncle Charles. Bottomline was, he was there, helpless, watching as he screamed and Grace screamed and she cried and struggled just like the first time, although in his dreams they’d run out of semi-remorseful brotherly fuck-ups.

Every time the knife struck he woke up screaming her name, and just like that, she’d be warm and alive right in front of him, shaking him so hard his teeth chattered.

“Jesus fuck, I’m going to send you my dental bill,” he said the first time, his voice a hoarse wreck, snivelling pathetically. Grace was crying, too, looking horrified at him, for him, he couldn’t tell which.

“Shut the fuck up, Danny,” she’d said, giving him one last shake for good measure.

He gave up pretending and hugged her as tight as he could. He was pretty certain her bones were grinding together but she never said a thing, hugging him back just as tightly too.

But those dreams where he gave Grace up? He genuinely felt like he wanted to die – no, he felt like he _deserved_ to die.

“…okay, you’re right, yelling is better.”

“Damn right, I’m right,” Grace muttered, tucking herself under his chin.

He had no idea how they’d gotten here from his penis. He tried to recall…ah.

“It’s definitely not a you-thing.” He could give her this much. “You’re an attractive woman, Gracie, you always were.”

Her smile was a pleased, shy thing. “The sort of skirt you’d chase?”

“Good god, no,” he blurted out automatically. “I wouldn’t have touched you with a 10-foot pole.”

Grace was wincing before he realised what he’d just said. “No, wait-.”

“Oh, I get it,” she murmured. “This is a ‘you don’t belong in this family’-type compliment, isn’t it?”

He hadn’t realised when she’d learnt to read him so well.

“I left Jory when I realised how much I loved him,” he said. “I wouldn’t have ever wanted to know you.”

That shy smile reappeared and she gently patted his cheek. “It’s not a competition, Danny.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t know how else to explain it.”

“So is it a you-thing? Or an Alex-thing?”

“Would you know that I don’t actually know?” he asked. “I mean, obviously it’s a me-thing. I don’t- you were right when you said I wasn’t ready.”

“I told you, I’m always right.”

“Shush, you.”

Grace giggled in his face, completely unrepentant.

“I don’t know why,” he continued. “I mean, you’re a beautiful amazing woman who loves sex.”

“I do love sex quite a lot,” she agreed. “I think I’d love sex with you even more.”

Heat flashed through him and he honestly found it difficult to breathe for a few moments.

“Um, thanks. But it’s not a competition,” he replied.

Grace sobered. “No, it isn’t.”

Daniel gently nudged her until she was splayed on top of him, head resting on his chest, one hand lightly tracing the scar on his neck. He supposed this conversation they’d just had amounted to consent, but he swore to himself to never take it for granted. He hadn’t always been callous; he’d been a considerate lover, once.

“…do you think Dr. Tran will want to talk about this?”

“I think she’d be upset if you didn’t talk about it. Remember when she asked if we were together?”

In hindsight, he was kind of dumb to have missed that giant neon flashing sign.

  
  


“How do you feel about your brother?”

Grace’s hand in his was the only reason why he could bring himself to answer.

“I loved him,” he croaked. “He was the only good thing in my family for so damn long. Like, he was the reason why I even lasted as long as I did; I couldn’t let him down. He was the one good thing in my life for so long and I did everything I could so that he’d stay that way.”

“Those are your past feelings,” Dr. Tran told him very gently. “How do you feel about him currently?”

“I…don’t think I can stop loving him,” he admitted, more than a little shamefaced, unwilling to look at Grace and see her reaction to that.

“But not all your feelings towards him are love.”

“No,” he relented. “When I think about what he had and what he did in spite of it, I – god, I hate him so fucking much for throwing it all away. I remember him crying over me as I di-.”

Grace squeezed his hand.

“-as he thought I was dead. That’s my last memory of him and I could tell- I could tell he meant it.”

“Just because people love us doesn’t mean that they aren’t also capable of terrible things. Perhaps it only means they loved us enough to try and hide it.”

Daniel snorted. “Has anyone told you you say some pretty shitty things sometimes, Doc?”

She smiled, eyes crinkled. “Only sometimes? That’s an improvement.” Then she grew serious. “Who they were to you doesn’t take away from what they did. And just because they were capable of terrible things doesn’t mean they couldn’t also love you and want what they thought was best for you.”

 _What they thought was best._ That sounded about right. He didn’t bother remembering his father very much, because he’d been pedestrian even at the best of times, but it was a little hard to forget the man screaming in his face about how they were all going to die if Grace survived, like that was the worst possible scenario. That this ignorant fresh-faced bride deserved to die if this den of murderers and accomplices lived.

Actually, Daniel was pretty sure his dad would’ve seen anyone die as long as he lived. For someone who’d married in, he’d certainly adapted well enough.

Then again, the fucker had played _checkers_ on his wedding night, of all the damn things. Even Charity drew chess and outplayed them all except Mum, trading barbs with her all night long.

(Or at least that was what Emilie told him in the morning, he’d been drunk as they’d drawn cards and completely and utterly soused before the first game was even over.)

“When he kills me in my dreams, I let him,” he admitted. Grace’s hand spasmed in his. “Whatever he says, whatever he wants to do to me, I let him.”

“Danny-.”

He shook his head to stem the veritable flood she was about to unleash in his defence.

“Try and unpack a little of that for me, Daniel,” Dr. Tran coaxed. “Is it because of guilt? Lingering affection?”

“I shouldn’t have survived that night. Sometimes I wake up and forget that I had, or I forget that I’m alive and think I’m dead-.”

His existence as a ghost hadn’t been half this complicated. He’d known exactly how dead he was and never slept. These days, Daniel couldn’t tell if he would be more terrified or relieved if he went to bed asleep and woke up dead. You’d think he’d get over himself since he’d already been dead, once, but-.

“I’ve never been so afraid to die before,” he whispered. He certainly hadn’t cared on his wedding night, or Grace’s. Anyone who knew him before would say he’d been drinking himself to death for a long time, now.

“Would you say that’s because of Grace?”

She made a hurt, mournful sound from beside him and he had to – their hands were still linked, but he put his arm around her and she pressed her face into the thin cotton of his shirt.

“It’s not an accusation,” he realised slowly. “It’s a fact.”

“How so, Daniel?”

He didn’t answer for a while, too distracted with dreamily stroking Grace’s soft hair. It was incredibly soft and smelt like them – those people at Aesop knew what they were doing, despite the lack of fables. He remembered the salesperson who’d helped them, bright-eyed and attentive, genuinely enthusiastic about the products he was selling with the absolute softest hands he’d ever felt on another human being.

His own were scarred and rough after a childhood toting guns around and playing parent to his siblings since their real parents weren’t especially interested in doing so. He pressed a kiss to the side of Grace’s head, lips lingering.

“I wanted to stay alive so that I could keep an eye on A- on my brother,” he said slowly. “He was the good one, the one who got out. I tried- I tried to make sure he stayed that way.”

“You made your choices, the same way he did his,” Grace told him fiercely, shaking his shirt in a pale imitation of the way she shook him awake.

“Grace is correct, Daniel,” Dr. Tran said in her soothing voice.

“I don’t know what I would do now, knowing what I do,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I didn’t- there were a lot of things I did that I’m not proud of.”

Did Grace know he was thinking of the first time he saw her once the game had started, face still relatively unmarred despite the tears that mussed her make-up? The way her voice had shook as she had said his name?

“ _She’s in the study!”_

And again, out in the woods. His dad had been out there with them, unseen, but he hadn’t said a word that wasn’t true.

“ _I’m not who you think I am.”_

“Danny, it’s in the past.” Grace’s words jolted him out of his memories. He bit his lip and blinked back tears, shaking his head, not quite knowing how to verbalise his thoughts.

“My brother was family. No matter what, I had to do my duty. His life was worth mine.”

“Danny!”

“Again, these are your past feelings, Daniel,” Dr. Tran said, both of them ignoring Grace’s interjection. “How do those feelings tie in with those you have for Grace?”

“Her life _is_ worth mine,” he said immediately, no if’s or but’s or how’s about it. “I would’ve-.” Even if he hadn’t intended for it to happen, even if he hadn’t realised the depth of Charity’s feelings – he still would’ve stepped in front of Grace to draw the line of fire. It had simply been the right thing to do.

“I would die for her. I’m terrified of living without her.”

Grace had been staring at him this entire time. He only looked at her when he’d finished but she had already looked away, and he was equal parts relieved and disappointed.

“Dr. Tran, do you think we could cut our session short today? I think Danny and I need to go back and talk about this ourselves.”

Dr. Tran watched them with for a long moment, her mouth a neutral line. And then she smiled.

“Grace, I know we’ve spoken briefly about your progress before, but I think the most conclusive sign of your progress is in the way you’re so willingly extending a helping hand to Daniel.”

“For all you know, I could be fucking him up even more,” Grace said, her chin tilted up in challenge. “There’s only one person among the 3 of us who knows what they’re doing, and it isn’t me.”

Daniel put his hand on her back, warm and steadying.

“Perhaps not, but you care about Daniel to want to do your best by him, anyway,” Dr. Tran replied, still so patient and unhurried.

“It’s only ‘cause it’s Danny,” Grace insisted. “I wouldn’t do this for everyone.”

“That’s fine,” Dr. Tran said. “It doesn’t make you selfish; it only makes you human.”

“I could fuck it up,” Grace said quietly. “I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m still fucked up. I’m not all there in the head.”

“No, Gracie, no,” he crooned, stroking her hair again.

“What you went through, what you survived, that left its mark on you,” Dr. Tran said. Grace’s pinky finger twitched in his grasp. “It’s not something you can forget about, but you don’t have to let it define you. You’re well on your way towards that, Grace. In fact, if it’s one thing that defines who you are now, the person I’ve seen over the past 18 months, it’s that you and Daniel come as a pair and you both want the best for each other, even if it’s at your own personal detriment.”

Daniel’s teeth sunk into his lip hard enough for him to taste copper. “Isn’t that a bad thing?”

“In some cases, codependency can be-.”

“No, that other bit about personal detriment, I already know we’re grossly codependent,” he interrupted and immediately felt like a heel for doing so. “I’m sorry for interrupting.”

Dr. Tran’s expression softened. “Apology accepted, Daniel. And yes, you’re right, I would normally caution against cleaving together so closely, because especially in a relationship of 2, it usually results in one of the 2 supports crumbling.”

He stared at Grace, stricken at the possibility that he could hurt her even more than he had. That he’d _been_ hurting her all along.

“ _Normally,_ Daniel,” Dr. Tran said pointedly, a little louder than usual in a tone that implied she’d been trying to get his attention for a while.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, ducking his head again.

Grace stroked the side of his face. She’d been doing that more often of late, petting his beard, following the way it grew in by his cheek and down his jaw.

He’d learnt to shave, shocking absolutely no one, with a straight razor, but he’d switched to an electric shaver when his rampant alcoholism and drug use caused his hands to shake almost constantly. He’d had to get clean for his CPA and Jory reaped the benefits of his newly rediscovered libido, but Daniel never once gave into the temptation of shaving him, terrified of blood breeding true and his hand ‘accidentally’ slipping.

“But I think Grace is in a comfortable enough space to keep either of you from relapsing, and I know you’d never let yourself hurt her.” Dr. Tran paused, the silence pregnant with words he couldn’t quite guess. “And Grace won’t let you hurt yourself.”

“I wouldn’t.” He genuinely was over being suicidal.

“And if you thought it would help Grace?”

How was that even a question? If there was anything he could do for her, absolutely anything at all-.

Some of that must have been evident in his expression since Dr. Tran softly exhaled, not quite a sigh, not an ‘I told you so’ at all.

“If you feel like you need to go back and discuss this situation on your own, you’re both adults and more than capable of making that decision for yourselves.” But if she advised against it, they wouldn’t. Dr. Tran smiled faintly as if she knew what they were thinking. “Even if, yes, as you so put it, the both of you are ‘grossly codependent’. But you want what’s best for Grace, and she’s recovered enough to not let either of you hurt yourselves.”

Daniel licked at the bite on his lip. “But what if-.” What if I fuck up and cause her to relapse? God – and the devil – knew how fucked up his head was.

“I trust you both,” Dr. Tran said. He wished it didn’t sound so much like a blessing.

“Also, I strongly recommend the 2 of you book an appointment for next week.”

That felt more like it.

  
  


After the appointment, Grace didn’t take them straight home. They swung by a corner Starbucks first to pick up their respective poisons before detouring to the park, finding a particularly shady nook to settle in.

She brushed a condensation-cold hand through his curls, grinning when he shuddered.

“We won’t stay too long, not with your delicate skin.” Then her grin widened and she slapped her hand over the nape of his neck, laughing when he squawked.

“You little shit!”

It just made her laugh harder, locking their elbows together as she pulled them down to sit against the thick bole of a tree. It didn’t seem right to be laughing like this in the afternoon sun after their recent session, but he couldn’t begrudge the way she looked with the sunlight in her hair, turning her aglow.

“Pedestal, Danny,” she murmured, teeth clinking on her metal straw. Hers was plain gold but she’d specially order a rainbow-hued one for him, along with a T-shirt in the broad stripes of the bisexuality pride flag.

“I’m not…” was his immediate rebuttal, only for Grace to raise an eyebrow at him. “Am I? Really?”

“My being happy makes you happy, but you don’t seem to understand that your being happy makes me happy, too.”

He didn’t, really. Grace made an irritated noise and said, “Yawn and put your arm around me.”

He snorted, but Grace just stared at him expectantly. “Really?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

He huffed but did as he was told. Let no one say that he wasn’t good at following orders. Well, no, his family had always despaired that he was never able to do anything right; as far as they were concerned, the last ‘right’ thing he’d done was sell out Uncle Charles, which was fucked up in so many ways he couldn’t even begin to elucidate. In fact, the last person he’d won so much approval from was _Jory._

Daniel didn’t know how he felt about that.

“What’s going through that head of yours?”

“I was just thinking about how good I was or wasn’t about following orders. God knows my family was always disappointed, but I think we can both agree that their approval wasn’t exactly what anyone in their right mind would want.”

Grace rolled her eyes at him but still rested her head against his, so she couldn’t be too annoyed.

“I’m pretty good at doing what you want, though? And- Jory never had any complaints, not serious ones, at least.”

“Jory? The man you dumped rather than married?”

Daniel hummed, tugging lightly on a loose strand of blond hair. That wasn’t exactly how he’d phrase his relationship with Jory, but he supposed it would do.

“I guess?”

Grace hummed back before leaning her full weight against him, holding on to the arm he had draped over her shoulder. She stayed silent for so long he thought their conversation was over. It wasn’t as if he didn’t trust that she would stay, because she’d made it clear from the start that she would. He just found it difficult to be convinced that he was worth it. It was just a matter of time before she realised that he was beyond saving.

“Jory is a part of your past, the same way your family is,” she eventually said. “It happened before, yes. Is it going to happen again?”

Daniel slowly shook his head.

“Then – I don’t understand why you won’t believe me when I say that you’re a good man.”

“It’s probably along the lines of you arguing when I say that you saved yourself.”

She clicked her tongue at him. “Danny-.”

“Okay, let’s take it that I…helped.”

“Danny.”

He licked his dry lips, wincing when his tongue ran over the dried split, tasting just a hint of copper. “It’s not like I set out to martyr myself for you, Grace; that’s just the way the cookie happened to crumble. It doesn’t erase all the fucked up shit I’d done before, either.” He wasn’t ever going to forget her face in the study or on the forest, he didn’t deserve to. “I don’t get a clean slate. That’s not- that’s not right.”

She let out a soft sigh and Daniel abruptly found himself with a lapful of woman.

“I- what?”

“Shut up, Danny, and just hold me for a bit.”

He could do that. Daniel scooted his butt back so that he was flush with the tree trunk, curling his arms around Grace’s slim back and tucking her head under his chin. Her face was pressed against his neck and he could feel her muzzily nuzzling at his jaw.

“You couldn’t even shave your beard for my wedding.”

“I thought you liked my beard, you can’t keep your hands off it.” Was she blushing? It felt like she was blushing.

“I couldn’t keep my hands off it after you trimmed it and started using the Aesop stuff,” she corrected primly. “Before that it was a gnarly mess that felt like pubic hair.”

He had to laugh, not having expected that comparison at all. “I trim my beard!”

“Yes, your beard. You conveniently forget about your _neckbeard.”_

He snorted. “I think my neckbeard is the least of my transgressions.”

Grace sighed again, curling into a tighter ball, her hands clutched in his shirt. He could just feel the faint quiver of her pinky through the cloth. “Yeah, dying on me was the worst of it.”

“…what?”

“I killed people that night, Danny,” she murmured and he shuddered. He didn’t know if it was because of her words or how they felt against his skin. “Your entire family did their damnedest to, too. Some of them even succeeded, intentional or otherwise.”

She mouthed at the scar on his neck and he choked back a groan.

“Gr- Grace-.”

“Charity might’ve shot you but you _died_ for me.” She pulled away and he moaned with equal parts relief and regret.

Grace held his head in her hands and shook him until he met her eyes. Until he met those big blue eyes, gazing solemnly back at him.

“You _died_ for me, Danny,” she said, and those eyes of her slipped shut as she rested their foreheads together. He had to stare, though, at that familiar face made so astonishingly new by proximity.

He slid his hands down her back to rest on her waist. Her lashes fluttered open, long enough and near enough to brush against his skin. Maybe they could’ve pulled away. Daniel didn’t want to.

“If I had to die for someone,” he murmured, willing her to see the truth in his eyes, “I’m glad it was you.” He brushed the tip of his nose against hers and then they were trading fucking eskimo kisses like 5-year-olds on a playground. This was the closest their touch had turned to sexual in the 18 months they’d been living out of each other’s pockets, apart from the time his cock had finally decided to wake the fuck up.

They weren’t over his headcase – either of theirs, not by a long shot.

“I’m still fucked in the head.”

Grace snorted, which should’ve been gross, considering their proximity. Instead, Daniel just found it endearing. God, he really was gone for her, wasn’t he? And he’d been dumb enough to not even realise it until there was no going back.

“It’s not an exclusive club,” she retorted.

“Yeah, I just wanted to make sure we were both on the same page before-.”

“Before?” she prompted, playfully nudging his nose with hers. He was getting cross-eyed looking at her smile.

“Before I asked if I could kiss you.”

Her smile widened. He bit down almost by reflex, wincing when that reopened the cut on his lip.

“What?”

“You haven’t asked me anything.”

He let out a nervous giggle, his forehead thunking against hers.

“Okay,” he said, breathing heavily through his nose. He glanced up to see Grace already watching him with those big blue eyes of hers, gleaming with the glow of the late afternoon sun.

“Can I kiss you?”

Her smile grew wider. It tasted even better.


	3. Sex and then Plot. Or was it Plot and then Sex? Plot-Sex? Sex-Plot? Plex? Splot??

Jory Mehigan lived in Seattle, Washington, on the second floor of a three-storey walk-up with his business consultant of a partner and their 2 Labrador-mixes. He worked at the University of Washington as an Adjunct Philosophy Professor, terrorising undergraduates with existentialism. 7 years after their breakup, his smile was just as bright as the one he’d worn when they’d been together.

He’d even written a short but heartfelt Facebook post about the Le Domas Tragedy, expressing his condolences for Daniel’s death with a line about how he’d always known ‘Daniel was a good guy’ that made him blush to read it, Grace cackling at his face. He reread the words and shivered as they eerily echoed what Grace had been trying to hammer into his head all this while.

Because he was also not-so-secretly a creep, Daniel had also looked at their mortgage, investment portfolio, credit score, and combined 401K before Grace browbeat him with the conviction that they didn’t need a miraculous windfall, that some people could be content without being richer than god.

Daniel remembered Jory ignoring his insistence that he could afford whatever he wanted – honestly, he’d just wanted Jory out of a flat that had rat infestations – and he'd only looked at flats with a rental that was about twice as much as he could comfortably afford, never mind that Daniel could have bought every single flat on his list without even blinking.

As if in retribution, Grace also showed no intention of moving out of the matchbox flat they still shared.

It was marginally smaller and cheaper than the flat he’d shared with Jory, and definitely smaller than the suite of rooms he’d grown up in and the penthouse he’d shared with Charity. It hadn’t affected him as a ghost, but when he’d first come back to life, he’d worried about crowding Grace or that it would feel claustrophobic.

But as the weeks passed and he discovered that he craved the closeness their postage stamp of a flat gave them, Daniel came to a startling realisation.

He’d preferred the space in the manor and the penthouse because it gave him a higher chance of avoiding everyone he lived with. He had his siblings growing up, but even then he could only tolerate them in small doses. As for Charity, he’d seen her credit card statements more often than he saw her in-person. He wasn’t _that_ far gone to give her unlimited access to his accounts, but he figured a USD$100,000/month was a decent limit. It had to be; Charity hadn’t even finished using it most of the time.

When he’d told Grace this, though, all she’d done was roll her eyes at him and mutter, “Fucking rich people.”

In contrast, he hadn’t been able to get enough of Jory then, and Grace, now.

Very, very slowly, they began to get over that Night.

They’d been dealing with it, obviously, but they’d spent 2 whole years orbiting in concentric circles around each other, their shared tragedy, and Dr. Tran. They both promptly had panic attacks when Dr. Tran first suggested opening their circles just shy of the 2-year mark, which dredged up all sorts of unpleasant reminders and set their recovery back a full month, but they were eventually convinced of the benefits.

(“No, people-watching at Starbucks doesn’t count,” Dr. Tran had sighed but her mouth was twitching and Grace gave him a high-5, so that was a win in his book.

“How about couple’s therapy?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?” he’d asked, curious.

“No,” Dr. Tran intervened before they could derail this session with the GraceandDaniel show, “couples therapy refers to a couple attending therapy for their relationship. The 2 of you are a couple attending therapy together.”

Daniel wrinkled his nose. “Sounds like semantics to me.”

“Sounds like some antics to me,” Grace added. He looked at her.

“That was genuinely awful.” He held up his palm and she smacked it, hard.

Dr. Tran sighed again but her mouth was twitching even harder.)

They couldn’t watch movies because they both freaked the moment the lights went down. Grace considered an exercise class, but she wanted it to be one they could do together. They did a Spin trial and Daniel tripped his way out halfway through and vomited from over-exertion. They stood outside the glass door of a TRX gym and watched for 20 minutes before walking away without ever exchanging a word.

“Rock-climbing?” he suggested.

Grace shot him a cutting look. Her pinky had never recovered and on bad days, she couldn't full close her other hand.

“You’re really going to let that stop you?” Daniel countered. “You climbed out of a fucking corpse pit with a gunshot wound, _and_ kept on climbing even after you shoved a rusty nail through it. You’re gonna tell me a fake plastic wall is gonna hold you back?”

Put that way, he probably deserved the wedgie, but it at least got Grace to sign them both up for rock-climbing courses. Surprising absolutely no one but her, she took to it like a fucking _ninja._ Because Daniel was a gracious man, he totally didn’t lord his superior knowledge over her. Because Grace was a gracious woman, she totally didn’t laugh when he fell off the kids’ beginner course 3 times (he was certain #3 had been her fault, even if he couldn’t prove it).

So they signed up for rock-climbing classes and tentatively made friends at the climbing gym they frequented. They also befriended the lovely Aesop salesperson, Steven, after he despaired at the state of their hands. Then Grace got it in her head that she wanted to be even more ninja than she currently was and also she signed them up for a capoeira trial and a yoga package.

Grace was the only woman at capoeira, and Daniel was the only man at yoga.

By their 3rd year, they’d gained a very tiny social circle, which largely consisted of Dr. Tran and Steven, and the occasional potluck with the people from the climbing gym. Or the capoeira school. Or the yoga studio.

…okay, maybe their social circle wasn’t _that_ tiny.

They also started having sex.

 _Fuck,_ they started having sex.

As a Le Domas, sex hadn’t exactly been hard to come by; one of the maids had gladly divested Daniel of his virginity when he was 14. When he went away to college under an assumed name, sex was the in-thing to do, between all the drugs and alcohol. For a guy, sex had very few consequences (apart from the fucking chlamydia, thanks for fucking _nothing,_ Rachel), and was generally pleasurable. He’d thought he’d been doing just fine with his penis until he met Liam _and_ his prostate, and _hello!_

For fuck’s sake, he’d had sex with Jory before he even knew his name. Emilie had just married Fitch and he’d gone back home to watch them play a mind-numbingly tedious game of Battleship before pulling an all-night bender at the club his first day back. Daniel might not always have been so clear about his intentions, but he’d been careful never to get seriously involved with anyone, Uncle Charles’s face only a nightmare away.

Jory had been a good laugh and a better fuck and a one-night-stand turned into a multiple-nights-stand and they’d been fucking for 6 months before Jory suggested they see each other outside of the bedroom, too, and it had been a slippery slope from then on.

2 years later he resurfaced with his CPA and the realisation that he loved Jory too much to risk him being Uncle Charles 2.0. He’d ended their relationship that very week.

Charity and sex did not belong in the same sentence, at least where Daniel was concerned. Charity _had_ had sex – obviously, considering where he’d met her, and he’d walked in on her riding the face of one of her bridesmaids at their reception – but she didn’t want to have sex with _him,_ which he hadn’t really cared about anyway. Daniel might have been an accessory to murder, but he wasn’t a rapist and he hadn’t been about to start with Charity, of all the fucking people in the world.

Besides, having sex with Charity would imply having been sexual attracted to her, which – yeah, no.

“Not at all?” Grace had asked, endlessly curious.

She’d seen Jory, by this point, who wouldn’t have looked out of place among the Weasleys (and that was why he hadn’t known about his scalp; Jory’s skin had been even more sensitive than his, and they’d made stupid jokes about gingers and allergies and vampires). They had spent an afternoon trawling through his old Facebook page, unearthing photos he hadn’t even realised were immortalised on the internet. There’d been prostate-Liam, his old Linguistics boyfriend, and fucking chlamydia Rachel, a couple other sex friends, even a metaphorical moneyshot of all the people from his ex-boyfriend’s frat he’d had several rather ill-advised orgies with after jello wrestling.

(“What the fuck?” Grace had said.

“It was meant to be hot, I think? I was definitely drunk at the time. I’m pretty sure I was high, too.”

“Wait, so did you wrestle?”

“You've seen what my motor skills are like. Trust me, they weren’t much better at 20. I bought the jello, obviously.”)

They even found the drag queen he’d gone to prom with.

(“Holy shit, I love her dress.”

“She might’ve gone into fashion with the money I paid her, I’m not sure, we can look it up-.”)

“Never,” he said simply. “Charity was- sharp and snappy and ruthless and- upfront about wanting my money. She was in a really bad place when we met and I thought – I could do this much. I didn’t think I was saving her, not with what marrying me would entail, but she believed that with enough money, she could save herself.” He shrugged. “I knew it wasn’t true, of course, but what does a privileged white rich kid like me know?”

Grace looked at him with those big blue eyes, nodded slowly, and then leant over to kiss him.

Because kissing was a thing they totally did these days.

Kissing and sex.

Kissing and all the steps that lay between kissing and sex.

The first kiss they shared had been chaste, barely more than a press of lip against lip. Grace had felt so soft and strong and so very _alive_ in his arms, sun-warmed and blood-warm. Besides, they were still at the park; it was probably a good thing they were outdoors and couldn’t jump straight into bed.

“Was that okay?” he whispered.

She grinned at him. “Very much so,” she whispered back. “In fact, so much so that you should do it again.”

He grinned back. “Should I?”

“Definitely.”

So he did.

And again and again and again.

Sometime in between chaste had been tossed out the window and she was licking into his mouth, sucking his upper lip and startling a moan out of him.

A loud, _“Ahem!”,_ shocked them both into toppling over onto the hard ground, a stern-faced woman throwing an ugly look their way. Feeling incredibly childish, Daniel stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry her way.

Grace stared, and then started braying out her laughter.

He wriggled his way off the gnarly tree roots onto the grass and turned on his side to be able to just… _look_ at her, full of life and full of joy. If he could see this every day for the rest of his after-afterlife, he’d count himself a lucky man.

“Could we take it slow?” he asked. “Not that I- I’m a lucky, lucky man, I just-.”

“Fucked in the head, I remember,” she replied, tapping her temple.

He took that hand and kissed the back of it, just because he could. That, out of everything, had her blushing.

“Really?” he had to jibe. “That’s what it takes?”

“I don’t do well with mushy!”

Daniel rolled to his feet and extended a hand to her. “Well, if you’re up to it – should we get dinner outside for a change? We can even still get pizza if you’re not ready to step away from the college student aesthetic.”

Grace laughed, a blush still lingering on her cheeks. “Is this- are you asking me out on a _date?”_

He shrugged, trying to play it cool even as he kept the hand he’d pulled her upright with. “Only if you’re up for it.”

She beamed up at him. “I honestly can’t wait.”

  
  


He took her to a local pizzeria and they shared a Margherita with fresh buffalo mozzarella and the fucking _noises_ she made licking the tomato juices from her hand-.

They stumbled over each other scrambling to get home and get naked and _fuck_ going slow.

“Tell me if I’m going too fast,” he panted, pressing her up against the elevator wall and sucking hickeys down her throat.

“No, no, definitely not,” Grace slurred, fumbling with his jeans. “Why the _fuck_ didn’t you wear sweatpants today?”

Well, she was in a sundress, and if that wasn’t a sign, he didn’t know what was.

Grace got the front door open and he kicked it shut before dropping to his knees. She was moaning in anticipation before he even touched her.

“Are you-?”

“Do it, do it,” she panted, getting her hands into his hair.

Daniel nuzzled the inside of her knee, kissing his way up the inside of her thigh. She groaned, her hands tightening in his hair. He abruptly remembered that he had hands, too, sliding them up the side of her legs and bunching her dress around her hips. He sucked hickeys above the waistband of her panties, a plain grey cotton pair, and when he pressed a kiss to the front of them he could _smell_ her.

Grace whimpered, thighs shaking. The seat of her panties were dark with her own juices.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

She tugged lightly at his hair. “Your fucking _beard,_ Danny,” she hissed.

“Is it too-?”

“It’s so fucking good,” she moaned, pulling his hair again. “Danny, c’mon-.” Her words dissolved into a wordless moan when he licked over the wet spot, getting just the faintest taste of her, filtered through her cotton panties.

Well, there really wasn’t anything stopping him now, so Daniel pulled down her panties and shoved his face in its place. Her moans went straight to his cock, as did the thick, heady taste of her. He didn’t bother with subtlety, not when she was this wet, and he thrust his tongue straight into her.

Grace _shrieked._

Thank god for soundproofing; this was a much better use for it. God, she was so wet, leaking down his chin as he licked into her as deeply as he could. He brought up a hand and ran his fingertips through her wetness, causing her to shiver. When he eased a finger inside, her knees buckled.

Daniel had to dive to catch her _and_ pull his finger out before she impaled herself on it; they had enough fucked up injuries between them to last an entire lifetime and he did _not_ look forward to having to explain that injury at the ER. He pooled to the floor with her in his lap because he simply wasn’t strong enough to hold her up. He grinned hopefully at her. Her face was ruddy with exertion and her grin was just as wide as his before she reeled him in by her grip on his hair.

“Wait- my mou-!”

Grace licked into his mouth the same way he’d licked into her and he groaned. “Do you really think I’ve never tasted myself before?” she asked when they parted, and then she _licked her lips._ If he weren’t already on the floor his knees would’ve buckled, too.

“God, I wanted you to come on my tongue.”

She laughed, high and bright. “I can still do that.”

“Shower, and then-?”

She pressed one more quick kiss to his mouth. “Good boy.”

He kicked off his boat shoes and fought to get his jeans off. He should’ve never let Grace talk him into these, no matter how good his bony arse looked in them. He thought she would’ve taken longer to pull off her converses but she had some sort of super secret ninja technique and then it was just a matter of pulling her sundress overhead.

He’d felt that she hadn’t been wearing a bra, but seeing it in-person was quite different. His breath caught in his throat and he froze, boxers still caught around one ankle.

Then she grinned and threw her soaked panties in his face.

“Last one in the shower is a shithole!”

“Fuck you, you cheating piece of shit!”

Because their flat was the size of a mouse hole, their race to the shower took approximately 2 seconds and then he was crowding her up against the bathroom counter for a kiss. The feeling of their naked bodies pressed together was _intoxicating._

Grace looked just as wrecked as he felt, and those big blue eyes of hers were practically black with desire.

Daniel kissed her, kissed her chin, her throat, the scar by her armpit, the valley of her breasts, a pathway down her belly. She whined, thin and reedy, when he pushed her back to sit on the counter and spread her legs. He didn’t bother beating about her bush anymore and slid 2 fingers back inside her, crooking them against her g-spot as he sucked hard on her clit.

In a matter of moments Grace was gasping, thighs jerking as she came.

Daniel sat back on his heels, smearing a hand across his mouth as he watched her slump against the mirror, feeling unbearably smug.

“Shower?” he asked when her gaze flickered up to meet his. Her gaze flickered down.

“Darling,” he drawled, “I’m a 40-year-old man with a history of alcoholism. There’s no way I’m coming more than once, there’s no rush.”

A frown was building between her brows. “This body of yours…does it have the same history?”

His eyes went wide, hand flying up to what had once been his cause of death. “Wait, am I technically a _corpse?”_

Grace covered her eyes. “Jesus Christ, you really know how to kill the mood.”

“You would have gotten there sooner or later too,” he pointed out. Her grimace told him everything he needed to know.

“Shit,” he muttered. “I need to go check if my vasectomy is still-.”

“Your _what?”_

“I was never gonna let kids be an option,” he shrugged. “I had one the minute I could bribe a reputable doctor to shut the fuck up.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“On the flip side, being able to fuck without condoms is _great.”_

Just like that, Grace was laughing again, the easy humour of before restored.

“We don’t have condoms though, and we don’t know if your vasectomy is still…there,” she said, easing herself off the counter and holding a hand out to him in a mirror of the park.

“I’ll take a handjob,” he said, gripping said hand firmly as she pulled him to his feet.

“Shame,” she replied, “I was rather hoping to return the favour.” She dragged their joined hands to her mouth, eyes locked onto him the entire time.

“God,” he groaned, his cock hard enough to hammer nails.

Grace backed him into the shower and turned on the water.

“So, pegging.”

He choked on air.

She was snickering at him even as she leant in and he could feel her hard nipples against his chest before she put their still-joined hands on his cock and he groaned. Her hand was small and full of callouses from rock-climbing – fuck, his was too, and he hadn't touched himself since coming back, his own hand felt like a stranger's. Grace nipped at his chin, eyes boring darkly into him.

“Kiss me, Danny,” she ordered, and he did. Water beat down on his back and he had one hand on the wall beside her head and one hand fisting his own cock alongside her and they kissed and they kissed and they kissed, water sluicing down their bodies. Her hand was so small – had he said that already? She gently eased his foreskin down, exposing the leaking head so she could thumb the slit, causing his hips jerked.

“Gracie,” he panted into her mouth.

She nuzzled his cheek, teeth scraping at his jaw. And then she slipped her hand low, caressing the base of his cock before tugging at his balls.

“ _Fuck!”_

The water washed away his cum on her skin and even if he squinted-.

“Yeah, I can’t tell if there’s sperm in there or not.”

Grace snorted and began to snigger. “You dumb fuck, that’s not how it works.”

“You can’t call me that, not when there’s been a dearth of fucking.”

All that did was make her laugh harder.

He put his arm around her waist and tugged her in, putting them directly under the shower.

“Shampoo? The bottles are all glass, so we’d better not fuck around too much. I’ve had enough of the ER for a lifetime.”

“Why d’you have to go and be so logical,” Grace grumbled, tugging at his sparse chest hair.

“Hey, ow! That’s an endangered species.”

She was still smirking, but at least her touch had softened. “Yeah, I was surprised, you know? Your chest is practically bare but your neckbeard starts growing the moment I look away.”

“This is the second time. What the hell has my neckbeard ever done to you?”

“Ruined my wedding photos.”

“Really? I thought I did that with the incest joke.”

“…actually, that’s my favourite picture.”

He chuckled, getting his hands into her hair. “What, really?”

“I look like me and you look so fucking proud of yourself,” she said, eyes closed as she relaxed into his hands. When he was done, she tugged his head down so she could return the favour.

“You’ll have to show me later.”

“Your smile is bigger in the quickie picture, though. God, you were so skeevy.”

He laughed. “I reached a new level of skeevy, just for you; I even creeped myself out. I was trying extra-hard, okay? But then _someone_ had to have nerves of steel and refuse to listen to all the warning signs.”

Grace sighed, resting her soapy head on his shoulder. “The wedding was just for a day and – you were family. I loved Alex enough to give him that much.”

They all knew how that ended.

“Do me a favour, alright?” he asked, urging her head off so he could wash the suds from their hair. “Next time you hear those Kill Bill klaxons go off in your head – maybe listen to them this time? Cut the fuck and run, darling.”

Grace snorted, already reaching for the conditioner. “Kill Bill klaxons. You fucking nerd.”

“Please, you know the exact sound I was thinking of, you’re as much a nerd as I am.”

She rolled her eyes but kissed him, which – mixed signals, much? He trailed a hand down her back, just skirting the edges of her scar, before hitching her thigh up on his hip.

She glanced up, eyes delighted and devious.

“I thought somebody said we shouldn’t fuck around in the shower.”

He traced her labia and she hummed, arching her hips into him. “I mean, if you want me to stop-.”

She groaned when he slid 2 fingers straight into her warm, slick heat. “You really will be a fuck if you stop now,” she growled at him, her voice petering off into a keen when he nudged her clit with his thumb. Daniel pressed his smile to the corner of her eye even as he cupped her breast with his other hand, lightly flicking the nipple.

Grace whimpered, reaching up to squeeze her other breast hard even as she rocked against his fingers.

“Another?” he murmured, nipping at her skin.

She exhaled against his cheek, damp wet heat coloured with her desire, and nodded. Daniel hissed at the 3rd finger – Grace felt tight, and they were only working with her own slick that washed away as quick as it came.

“You okay?” he murmured.

Grace nodded quickly. “I’m fine,” she muttered, “it’s just- it’s been awhile-.” She whined when he pulled out his ring finger.

“You can come like this,” he said, kissing her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, his fingers pumping inside of her while he massaged her clit. “C’mon, Gracie, ride my hand, take what you want.”

“What I want is your cock,” she said hotly, pulling him down into a messy, sloppy kiss. She fucked herself on his fingers, her juices leaking down his wrist. Against his thigh, his limp cock gave a valiant twitch.

“Lube, condoms, vasectomy, in that order,” he muttered, sucking on her tongue.

She laughed into his mouth. “What a fucking shopping list.”

He crooked his fingers against her g-spot again and she whimpered, hips jerking as she pressed herself as close to him as she could. He had a feeling she would’ve crawled inside his skin if she could.

Daniel cupped her face and kissed her, slow and lush with plenty of lips and tongue, and then flicked her clit. Her cry was muffled against his mouth as she came, shuddering heavily. He kept kissing her through her orgasm, his hand still caught between them, fingers buried inside of her.

He licked his lips and inadvertently licked hers, too, feeling the sting from where he’d bitten clean through.

“Can you give me one more?” he asked. She was still shuddering around him - if he could bring her back to the edge…

She moaned out his name. “Danny.” Well. It wasn't a complaint. 

He began to move his fingers, gently, savouring how relaxed she was after her orgasm, and teased her with that 3rd finger again. She let out a little shivery sound when his ring finger slid in with little resistance. He could feel her start to clench fitfully around him and she gave a small cry.

He licked his lips again, spreading his fingers a little. Grace groaned, back beginning to bow, so he left his fingers alone and rubbed soft circles around her clit, teasing at the little cluster of nerves. She whimpered, pulsing around him as she rode his hand into another orgasm.

“God,” she sighed, slumping against him.

Daniel was feeling uncannily proud of himself. “Sure, but I answer to Danny, too.”

Grace snorted. “You arsehole.”

“Slander,” he snickered, pressing a sloppy kiss to her cheek.

She trailed her hand to his cock, pinky twitching against his foreskin. “Can you-?”

He shuddered at her touch, shifting away. “No, the mind is willing but the flesh is not.”

“Old man,” she teased, nuzzling his jaw to soften the sting from her words.

Their wash was more sloppy than thorough given how Grace was drooping with exhaustion, but it wasn’t like either of them particularly cared. He bundled her up in a bath towel and dropped a smaller towel on her head. She had to fight her way out of the excessive cloth to drowsily scowl up at him.

He put her toothbrush in her hand. “Brush, and then sleep.”

They didn’t bother with clothes, falling naked into bed and almost immediately soaking their pillows. He draped his arm around her waist and she burrowed against him, one hand resting on his chest. Exhaustion was tugging at his mind, but there was one niggling thought that wouldn’t leave him be.

“Does it bother you?”

Grace jerked from where she’d been drooling on his shoulder. “Wuh?”

“Shit, no, sorry, go back to sleep,” he murmured, running a hand through her damp hair.

“No,” she slurred, “whazzit?”

“Gracie, it’s okay,” he coaxed, stroking her hair. “Go back to sleep.”

“Iz botherin’ you,” she muttered, her eyes a thin sliver under thick lash.

“Look, you’re barely even awake-.”

“You gonna argue wi’ me or tell me wha’s botherin’ you?” she demanded, thumping her head onto his shoulder. Did she just-?

“Did you just try and headbutt me?”

She glared up at him. “Did it work?”

He snorted, teasing out the knots in her hair. “I’m 12 years older than you.”

Grace scrunched up her face. “That- I was joking.”

He shrugged, jostling her slightly. “Not really. It’s not a joke if it’s true.”

“Alex was 8 years older than me.”

“And I’m older than that.”

Charity had been 6 years his junior; Grace was twice that. He’d never wanted to turn into his father-.

“For fuck’s sake, Danny.”

Had he been thinking aloud again?

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Couldn’t even let me have the afterglow, could you?”

He shrugged again, threading their fingers together where her hand lay on his chest.

Grace sighed, crawling more fully on top of him. Daniel settled his free hand on the small of her back.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured into his neck. “I was just trying to tease – I didn’t think you’d take it so seriously.” She paused before repeating, “I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t think I would, either,” he said truthfully.

“I don’t know how to make it better.” The age difference between them was never going to change.

He stroked her back and counted it as a win when she didn’t even blink as his fingers trailed over her scars. “It’s okay, it’s something I’ll have to work through on my own.”

She hiked her thigh over his hip in an echo of what they’d done in the shower. No, bad penis. “You might have to find your own answer, but you don’t have to be alone while you do it.”

He muzzily pressed his face into her damp hair. “Are you still paying Dr. Tran extra? Should she get a finder’s fee for therapy-ing you to therapy me?”

“Go the fuck to sleep, Danny,” she mumbled into his collarbone. “We can tag-team the next existential crisis in the morning.”

In the morning, however, Grace woke him with her mouth on his cock and her hand cupping his balls.

“Jesus fuck,” he hissed, still muzzy with sleep.

She popped the exposed head out of her mouth, foreskin already peeled down. “How rude,” she said brightly. “I know you’re still half-asleep, but you shouldn’t call out another guy’s name while I’m blowing you.”

He covered his eyes and laughed; his erection didn’t flag in the least.

So, sex.

Lots of sex.

Grace had not been kidding about how much she liked sex, but he was a little surprised about how much she liked it with him. She was also incredibly creative with her suggestions for how they could maximise his limited number of orgasms. The last time Daniel had been naked this much, he’d been living with his then-boyfriend’s fraternity as their kept boy.

They went to go get his vasectomy checked out, and once it became clear that all his pipes were in working order, he made arrangements to get that changed as soon as possible. He was surprised again when Grace brought up the possibility of sterilisation for herself, too.

“It can’t be that hard to comprehend that kids are never going to be an option for me, either.”

“Yeah, but you’re not…”

She raised her eyebrows.

He closed his eyes and groaned. “This is so fucked up,” he muttered. She was a Le Domas by marriage but the only one who still carried the name, while he was biologically the last living Le Domas by blood, if inexplicable reincarnation even counted.

“I mean, it should be enough if one of us does the procedure,” he finally said, pushing his hair out of his face. “The recovery time-.”

Grace took his hand. “We can get them done at the same time and bitch our way through the recovery together.”

Their respective sterilisation processes laid them out for a cumulative week and they spent the rest of the month making up for it. They went on a shopping spree the day before Grace ticked off the last day of her next period and they celebrated by having filthy, filthy condom-less sex all over the flat.

Grace’s miles of pale skin marked up like a blank canvas and he spent hours, sucking and licking and biting all sorts of patterns as she moaned and writhed under him.

“How long do you think I can eat you out for until my jaw aches too much?” he murmured, nibbling on the edge of her hipbone.

She lifted one leg, carelessly exposing her core to hook her knee over his shoulder, the rest of her as limp as a noodle. Her folds were already flushed and glistening with anticipation and Daniel felt saliva pool in his mouth.

“I think a better question is how long can you eat me out for until I get impatient and ride you.”

He chuckled, dragging his beard up the inside of her thigh. She gasped, hips arching and thighs falling open wider.

“I haven’t even touched you yet,” he murmured, sucking marks on either side of her centre, careful to let nothing but the strayest whisker brush her folds. He could smell her arousal, smell her wetness, and when he nuzzled the crease of her hip, she moaned, her folds glistening with wetness.

“I am _this_ close to throwing you over,” Grace hissed, and when he glanced up, he could see her eyes squeezed shut, face tight with the strain. Her chest was heaving, nipples standing at attention.

He licked her blood-flushed clit and she _shrieked._ When he grazed her with a bit of tooth, her thighs snapped sharply on either side of his head.

“You should,” he panted, abruptly aware of how achingly hard he was, “you absolutely should-.”

He couldn’t get another word in before she flipped them and he found himself on his back, Grace straddling his lap and holding his cock steady under her. He was so hard the head of his cock was dark red, leaking precum like a broken tap.

“Yeah,” he grunted, running his hands up her thighs, “take what you want, take it, Gracie, _take-.”_

His words cut off in a groan as she sunk down on him, both of them so wet there was barely any friction, everything so much _hotter_ without the barrier of latex between them.

“Fuck, Gracie, you feel so good,” he crooned, kneading her thighs.

Above him, Grace shuddered, her head thrown back as her breasts bounced with the action. Daniel eyed the bite marks decorating her nipples and licked his lips. He slid his hands up her thighs, massaging her waist before reaching up to squeeze her breasts. She wasn’t sensitive the way he was, but she liked the feel of his hands on her.

He let her set the pace, just helped it along with little thrusts aimed at her g-spot, and then he dragged a hand to her lower belly, tugging lightly at her golden-blonde curls. He laughed when she growled at him, circling his thumb around her clit, not quite touching it.

“You feel pretty damn good yourself,” Grace panted, looking down at him with bright blue eyes.

“I’m pretty sure you can feel better,” he replied, and flicked her clit.

They both groaned when Grace tightened over him, back bowing as her insides pulsed with the force of her orgasm.

She was slumped over, breasts heaving as he gingerly sat up, still hard as nails inside her. She whined when his cock shifted and he hissed when that had her tightening around him and it was just this chain reaction of bitten-off gasps and whimpers as they tried to get into a comfortable position. By the time they got there, they were both panting and sweat-slick, Daniel teetering on the knife’s edge.

He wasn’t exactly one-and-done anymore, especially after Grace started dragging him to rock-climbing and yoga and capoeira, but it did take him awhile to get back up again.

“C’mon,” Grace murmured in between kisses, grinding filthily into his lap, “I’m sure we can keep ourselves occupied until you get it up again.”

He groaned, digging his fingers into her waist. “I could be convinced,” he said breathlessly.

Grace grinned, pressing her breasts against him. “We went shopping yesterday for a reason, remember?”

His hips bucked involuntarily. “How could I forget,” he grit out.

She kissed a line up the side of his face, nipping at the edge of his beard. “You know that double-ended vibrating dildo?”

“What, the sparkly purple one?” he asked, looking at her with interest. She’d told him she’d never played with her arse before, but Daniel was an old hat at that and offered to ease her into it. And ease into her, but she would’ve thought he’d been possessed if he hadn’t made that frankly awful joke.

Grace’s grin grew edges. “I threw in a harness while you weren’t looking,” she said, licking her lips. Daniel’s nostrils flared. “I couldn’t forget your reaction the last time I mentioned pegging.”

“Jesus Christ,” he groaned, cock jerking fitfully

She started rocking in his lap again, kissing him deeply. Despite everything, his orgasm was a quiet, punch-drunk thing, wrapped around Grace with his nose buried in her mussed hair. They rolled to the floor to settle on their sides.

“Gimme a couple of minutes,” he murmured, pressing sloppy kisses to her face, “and I’ll lick you clean.”

“You just want to give me beard burn all over my thighs,” she said, tipping her chin up to catch his mouth with hers. They traded lazy luxurious kisses and wandering hands. “You do realise I’ll also be leaking your cum?”

He slipped a hand between them, sliding 2 fingers straight in. Her breath hitched and she was incredibly wet.

“It won’t be the first time I’ve given you beard burn,” he pointed out as if they both didn’t know how much she liked it. “Also, I’ve had boyfriends,” Daniel added. He was probably doing a really terrible job at maintaining a straight face. “Do you really think I’ve never tasted myself before?”

Her eyes widened and he knew she was thinking back to when she’d first said those words to _him._

“You little shit,” she said, blue eyes glittering with mirth.

He chuckled, tugging her on top of him. “That’s all you, Gracie.”

She rolled her eyes but still bent down to kiss him again, moaning when he started to move his fingers.

“Can you come again, you think?” he asked.

“What happened to licking me clean,” she gasped, hitching her thigh on top of his hip, exposing more of herself to his fingers.

“Don’t worry, darling, that’s still on the docket,” he murmured against her lips.

Grace bit his bottom lip, making soft, breathy grunts as she rocked her hips against him. “While you’re down there,” she whimpered, “you can show me how to open you up.”

Daniel groaned when his cock twitched and began to take notice. “Oh?”

“That’s- _ah!_ \- the best- _umf-_ way to learn, isn’t- _ah-_ it?”

They were laid out for almost half-an-hour after that last one. Daniel’s forearms were beginning to ache. Or maybe that was the rock-climbing they’d done earlier in the week. Maybe it was both these actions compounded.

Grace snorted as he began to wonder aloud. She reached over and began to massage his arms, one at a time.

“Poor baby,” she teased.

“I work hard for your pleasure,” he retorted. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how much you like my forearms, too.”

“Lies and slander,” Grace sniffed, but she was blushing, too. “Maybe not as much as your beard,” she relented.

He grinned and kissed her. “My beard or the beard-burn it gives you?”

She rubbed a thumb against his cheek, following the curve of his face down towards his jaw – and then burst out laughing.

“What?”

Grace was still sniggering when she explained, cheeks red. “I think we’ll need a shower first. My- I’ve dried all over you and your beard is starting to get crusty.”

“Oh my god, that’s disgusting.”

Sadly, blowjobs in the shower weren’t ever going to be a thing ‘cause the shower stall was too small for Grace tocomfortably be on her knees, and the one time she’d tried, water from the showerhead had gushed straight up her nose and she’d choked for a far less fun reason.

They kept their shower fairly quick, too sloppy to manage more, but they’d also left all the windows closed when they’d gone in, so when they came out in a cloud of steam, the entire flat stank to high heavens.

“Can we open all the windows,” he choked out. “It smells like a whorehouse in here.”

“The thing about you saying these sorts of things is that I know you actually know what a whorehouse smells like,” Grace muttered, her words muffled from where she’d draped a towel over her head.

He tried to follow what she said; it took an unconscionably long time to unravel that single sentence.

“…yes, I know what a whorehouse smells like,” he said, “I met Charity in one.”

“I don’t have the mental capacity to unpack all that right now,” she moaned.

“C’mon, let’s get the windows open,” he said, nudging her in front of him. “Then we can go to bed and sleep for a week. I can’t believe we didn’t even make it to the bedroom this time.”

Grace made a sad sound as she toed the carpet. “This has to go to the cleaners, Danny. I don’t even know how we’re going to explain the stains on that.”

“With money.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“You have not given me any fucks, so I have no fucks to give.”

Grace honked out a loud, ungraceful laugh, hobbling into the bedroom on wobbly legs. “Fuck you, Danny!” she crowed as she landed in the bed, face first. He fell in beside her, grinning up at her ceiling.

“What are you so damn happy about?” she mumbled. When he glanced over, Grace had rolled onto her side, all the better to watch him. Her breasts were weighted down with gravity, slung to one side. It was such a queer little thing to notice, so very random and banal, that really drove into his head that this was life for him, now.

“Nothing in particular,” Daniel replied truthfully. “I’m…just happy.”

His curls were going to dry crunchy again, and if Grace fell asleep like this, she’d wake up with pillow creases on her cheek.

“Yeah?” she asked, barely even awake anymore. She made a little drowsy rumble when he put his arm over her waist and curled close, seeking out his warmth. He pressed his nose to the top of her head, inhaling the mixed scents of their shampoo _and_ conditioner.

“Yeah,” he exhaled, and followed her into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took entirely too long and I'm still not exactly happy with how it ended, but I'm DYING of sitting on this for months and here it is, le sigh. As of now I'm marking this as complete, but it did end pretty inconclusively, so maaaaaybe I'll add to this? Unfortunately, these 2 still make my head hurt but they don't make my heart ache anymore D: I do wish them all the best, though, because they fought so fucking hard to get there.

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to Juurensha, whose accountant!Daniel headcanon I borrowed. I also wanted to borrow elements of Grace going the foster trust route, but she absolutely refused to listen to me and go into any sort of detail about what she wanted to do with her money, so what can I say? And as for Shaekspeares' amazing bisexual!Daniel headcanon, I feel like he took that and ran with it in an unexpectedly slutty direction. God, I love these 2 so incredibly much, have I said that recently? 
> 
> Also, I rearranged the Le Domas family history to fit my headcanon. I know Helene and Tony are canonically siblings, but fuck that shit, the women ruled the Le Domas household with an iron first; Emilie clearly inherited all of Tony's histrionics. 
> 
> I cannot stress how much I DO NOT KNOW about accounting, inheritance law, therapy, depression, suicide attempts, or panic attacks, medical dramas not withstanding. They’re a plot device – the fact that they occur are important, but not how they happen. I don’t know what therapists are supposed to sound like, just that the fictional Dr. Tran works for Grace and Daniel, but if you happen to be experiencing any of the above, please seek out a genuine professional and don’t take Dr. Tran’s word or Grace and Daniel’s utter codependency as the gospel truth.


End file.
